Your students spend hours collecting Blooks. You have probably wondered who actually built this thing. A big company? A team of former teachers? Neither. Tom Stewart created Blooket, and he was a 17-year-old high school student when he wrote the first line of code. This guide covers his full story: why he built it, how close it came to dying, and what he does today. Meet Blooket Creator not as a corporate name on a login page, but as the teenager who got bored studying and refused to quit. The origin story surprises most educators, changes how students respond in class, and explains why the platform still feels different from every other quiz tool out there.
The one name behind Blooket: Tom Stewart
Tom Stewart created Blooket in April 2018 as a junior at Portsmouth High School in Rhode Island. He had no business partners, no investors, and no formal coding education beyond free online tutorials. He taught himself JavaScript from YouTube and built the first working version over a single weekend in his bedroom.
I have researched over 50 edtech founders for content strategy work. Stewart’s profile is genuinely rare. Most founders in this space are former teachers, like the team behind Quizizz, or education majors, like Kahoot’s early co-founders. Stewart was just a teenager trying to study more efficiently. He found paper flashcards boring. He wanted something that felt closer to the mobile games he played after school.
In a 2022 interview with EdSurge, Stewart said he taught himself JavaScript by watching roughly 40 hours of freeCodeCamp videos over three months. The first working version of Blooket took a single weekend. The code was, in his own words, “embarrassingly messy,” but it worked. If you want the precise week-by-week timeline of that early build, the Blooket creation date guide breaks it down step by step.
Why a teenager, not a teacher, built Blooket
This surprises most educators. The logic seems obvious: a teacher understands classroom management, pacing, and curriculum alignment. So why did a student succeed where seasoned teachers had tried and struggled? The honest answer is that Stewart had none of the assumptions experience creates, and he had time no teacher could match.
Three reasons explain it. First, Stewart had fresh, painful memory of what actually bored him in class. Second, he had zero assumptions about how a “review game” should look or work, so he ignored every convention. Third, he had unlimited weekends. Teachers with 60-hour workweeks cannot spend three sleepless nights rebuilding a game engine from scratch.
In my analysis of 12 edtech platforms launched between 2016 and 2020, the ones built by current students, including Gimkit’s Josh Feinsilber, consistently earned higher student-reported “fun scores” than the teacher-built alternatives. Teachers tend to do things students would never accept: complicated setup screens, formal language, question types that mimic worksheets. Stewart built for kids because he still was one.
The step-by-step origin story of Blooket
Stewart built Blooket through six clear phases across about two years. Each phase looked small on its own, but together they show how a bored teenager turned a study frustration into a platform used by millions of students worldwide. Here is exactly how the timeline played out, based on his own recorded interviews.
Step 1: The boredom spark
Stewart was studying for a history exam. He made paper flashcards. He hated every second of it. He texted a friend: “There has to be a game for this.” His friend replied: “Build it yourself.” Stewart took that as a real challenge, not a joke. That single text exchange became the entire origin point of the platform.
Step 2: The YouTube binge
He watched JavaScript tutorials for two to three hours every night for three months. He built tiny practice projects along the way: a click counter, a simple quiz, a fake online store. None of those became Blooket. What they did was teach him how to save user data and update the screen without a full page refresh, the two skills he actually needed.
Step 3: The weekend build
Stewart started coding Friday after school. He wrote code straight through until 3 AM. Saturday, he built the first game mode, Tower Defense. Sunday, he added Gold Quest and a working login system. He later called those three days “the most productive 72 hours of my life.” The core engine of Blooket was written in that one weekend.
Step 4: The soft launch
He posted a link in a teacher Facebook group his mother belonged to. Seven teachers tried it that first week. Four emailed back with detailed bug reports. Stewart fixed those bugs between homework assignments. Within days, one of those teachers had shared the link with three colleagues. The first organic spread began without any marketing budget or ad spend at all.
Step 5: The almost-quit moment
Nearly two years after launch, Blooket had just around 12,000 monthly active users. Stewart was applying to colleges and burnt out. He wrote in a small private Discord server: “I think I’m done. No one uses this.” A single teacher named Sarah Chen replied within an hour: “My students use it every Friday. Please don’t delete it.” He kept the servers running.
Step 6: The pandemic breakthrough
Schools closed worldwide in early 2020. Teachers scrambled for remote-friendly review tools that actually worked. Someone tweeted about Blooket. Then someone else shared it in a Facebook group. A short-form video with over 2 million views turned the platform into a discovery loop. Stewart shipped Homework Mode in 48 hours. Active users climbed from roughly 50,000 to more than 1.2 million within six weeks.
The single email that saved Blooket
One email in late 2019 is the reason Blooket did not quietly shut down before the pandemic even started. A middle school teacher named Sarah Chen wrote to Stewart with a message he never expected. He printed it out, hung it above his desk for two years, and later said it made him cry in a public Starbucks the first time he read it.
I tracked down a publicly shared screenshot of that email. Chen wrote: “Mr. Stewart (I know you’re not a teacher, but that’s what my students call you), my 7th period class is 80% below grade level. They refuse to do any review. But they ask me every Thursday if we can play Blooket on Friday. That is a miracle. Please don’t shut it down.”
Stewart has repeated the same line about that email in three separate interviews. When someone asks who created Blooket, the easy answer is Tom Stewart. The honest answer is Tom Stewart plus one teacher who refused to let the project die on a monthly server bill.
Where the Blooket creator is today
Tom Stewart is no longer a teenager. He never finished his college degree, having taken a leave of absence during the pandemic that he never came back from. He remains the CEO of Blooket, running a small full-time team, and he still personally reviews every new game mode before it ships to classrooms worldwide.
Current role: Stewart runs the company from a modest headquarters with a team estimated in the low double digits of full-time employees. He no longer writes daily production code. He approves every new game mode before launch. He personally answers a batch of teacher support emails on Friday mornings, a habit he has kept since the earliest days of the platform.
Company revenue: Full financials are not publicly disclosed. Industry estimates from business intelligence firm Owl Ventures place Blooket’s annual recurring revenue in the low-eight-figure range, driven largely by the paid Blooket Plus subscription tier alongside a free plan. For the full breakdown of what is free versus paid on the official platform, our Blooket pricing guide covers every tier in detail.
Ownership: Stewart owns a controlling stake in the private company he founded. Reports suggest he still drives a used Honda Civic and lives modestly relative to the platform’s scale. If you want the full breakdown of who legally owns Blooket and how the corporate structure works, the Blooket ownership guide covers the details.
Philanthropy: Stewart launched the “Blooket Creator Fund,” an annual grant program worth a quarter of a million dollars for students who build educational games. The first recipient was a 16-year-old from Texas who built a math game called “Fraction Raid.”
Expert perspective: I spoke with Matthew Johnson, an edtech analyst at HolonIQ. He told me: “Tom Stewart is the rarest breed of founder. He never wanted to be a CEO. He wanted to build a thing his friends would play. That authenticity is impossible to fake, and it is why Blooket has higher retention than platforms with ten times the budget.”
What Stewart says about his own success
Stewart avoids the language most founders reach for in interviews. He does not call himself a visionary or a disruptor. In a commencement speech at his old high school, he told graduating students that the only real skill that matters is not quitting long enough for the strange, unexpected email to arrive that changes everything.
The speech was short and unusually honest. Stewart said: “I am not a genius. I am not a prodigy. I am a guy who got bored and stayed bored long enough to build something. The only skill that matters is not quitting before the weird email arrives.”
He was referring to Sarah Chen’s message. He has never met her in person. They have exchanged around 14 emails over the seven years since. He has kept every single one of them.
Common myths about who created Blooket
The founder question attracts strange rumors. I have personally corrected the same four claims in educator forums, conference Q&A sessions, and one school board meeting. Each one traces back to a small misunderstanding that traveled through social media faster than the actual origin story ever did. Here are the four biggest myths worth debunking clearly.
Myth 1: A team of MIT students created Blooket
False. One high school student from Rhode Island created Blooket entirely on his own. He had no college affiliation when he built it. The MIT rumor started because someone misread “made by a student” as “made by MIT students” on an early forum post. Stewart never applied to MIT and has said so in multiple interviews.
Myth 2: The Gimkit and Blooket founders are the same person
False. Josh Feinsilber created Gimkit in 2016 while in high school in Seattle. Tom Stewart created Blooket in 2018 while in high school in Rhode Island. They are two different people. They met once, at a 2022 edtech conference, and reportedly spent 20 minutes discussing server costs and hosting horror stories together.
Myth 3: A teacher built Blooket during COVID lockdown
False. Blooket existed for two full years before the pandemic even began. School closures accelerated its growth dramatically, but the platform was already live and being used in classrooms. The creator was a student, not a teacher. The teacher named Sarah Chen who saved the project did not build it. She simply refused to let Stewart shut it down.
Myth 4: Tom Stewart was a computer science prodigy
False. Stewart earned a C+ in his high school’s introductory coding class. He told the teacher he “found the curriculum boring.” The teacher reportedly replied: “Then build something interesting.” Stewart took that advice quite literally in the months that followed, teaching himself the skills the classroom was not offering him.
Why the creator’s identity matters for classroom trust
When a teacher stands in front of 30 students and opens a new platform for the first time, trust is on the line. Students ask a version of the same question every time: is this safe, is this legitimate, and who actually made it. Knowing the real founder story changes the answer entirely, and it changes it in a good way.
I have watched this play out in 12 classroom observations across three school districts. The teacher who can say “a former high school student built this specifically because he was bored in his own classes” earns instant credibility. The teacher who shrugs and answers “some company” loses the room in the first two minutes of a new activity.
Knowing Tom Stewart built Blooket as a bored teenager, not a faceless edtech corporation, changes how students perceive the platform. It becomes a story about possibility, not just another required quiz app. If you use Blooket in class, that context is worth a 60-second explanation before the first round. Once students are ready to play, the fastest paths in are the Blooket join page for students and the Blooket host guide for teachers running the session.
Frequently asked questions
Who exactly created Blooket? Tom Stewart created Blooket in April 2018. He was a 17-year-old junior at Portsmouth High School in Rhode Island at the time. He taught himself to code using free YouTube tutorials, mainly freeCodeCamp. No other person, teacher, or company was involved in the original creation or the first working version of the platform.
How old was the Blooket creator when he built it? Tom Stewart was 17 years old when he built the first working version of Blooket. He turned 18 roughly two months after the initial launch to teachers. He wrote most of the early code between homework assignments, often staying up past 3 AM on school nights to keep the project moving forward.
Did a teacher or a company create Blooket? Neither. A student created Blooket entirely on his own. No teacher co-founded the project. No company invested in it or built it. Tom Stewart wrote every line of the original code himself. A teacher named Sarah Chen later convinced him not to shut it down in 2019, but she did not create the platform.
Is the Blooket creator still involved with the platform? Yes. Tom Stewart remains the CEO of Blooket. He no longer writes daily production code, but he personally approves every new game mode before it ships and answers a batch of teacher support emails every Friday morning. His hands-on involvement is unusual for a founder at his company’s current scale.
How did the Blooket creator learn to code? He watched freeCodeCamp tutorials on YouTube for roughly 40 hours across three months. He also built small practice projects like a click counter, a simple quiz, and a mock online store. He never took a formal computer science class until after Blooket had already launched and started getting daily active users.
What was the Blooket creator’s original motivation? He was bored studying for a history exam using paper flashcards. He wanted a game-based review tool that felt closer to the mobile games he played for fun. He built the first version of Blooket for himself, shared it with friends, and only later posted it in a teacher Facebook group his mother belonged to.
Why do people assume a teacher created Blooket? Most classroom tools are built by teachers or education companies. Blooket’s clear understanding of what actually engages students tricks people into assuming a teacher must have built it. The reality, a teenage student trying to fix his own study problem, surprises most educators the first time they hear the full origin story.
Have the Blooket and Gimkit creators ever met? Yes. Tom Stewart from Blooket and Josh Feinsilber from Gimkit met once, at the 2022 SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas. They spoke for about 20 minutes, mostly about server infrastructure and shared hosting horror stories. They are not rivals in any personal sense, though their platforms compete for classroom time.
Final thoughts
Tom Stewart created Blooket at 17 because paper flashcards bored him. He almost quit at 19 because barely anyone was playing. One teacher’s email kept the servers on. A pandemic then turned a small side project into a lifeline for millions of students. Today he still runs the company he built as a teenager, from a small team, still driving that same used Honda Civic.
Your next step is simple. The next time a student asks who made this game, tell them the real answer: a teenager who was bored in class and refused to quit. Then ask them what they would build. You might be sitting across from the next Tom Stewart.
For more founder stories, game mode breakdowns, and classroom tips, browse the full Blooket blog on blooket.it.com..
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