When Students Become Builders: Inside the IQAPS Co-Creation Program

The Birth of IQAPS: Co-Creating with Students

As a UX researcher at Quizizz, one thought kept coming back to me: What if we could listen to students in real time, not just through data points or metrics, but through conversations, debates, laughter, and their raw, unfiltered ideas?

We didn’t want to rely solely on distant data. We wanted students in the room with us, co-creating, challenging, and imagining alongside us.

That’s how IQAPS was born. The International Quizizz Ambassadorship Program for Students. (Yes, it’s a bit of a mouthful, and we still chuckle every time we say it out loud.)

But IQAPS isn’t just another feedback loop. It’s a full-on co-building program where students don’t just react to what we create, they help shape the platform they use every day.

It all started with a scrappy idea and a Google Doc, which eventually evolved into the structured IQAPS forms we use today.

Facing the Challenge : Questions and Ambition

We knew we wanted student voices in our product, design, and development process, but we didn’t have a playbook. Just a lot of ambition, and a lot of questions.

• How do we reach students across the world from our office in Bangalore?
• How do we make it meaningful, not just symbolic?
• How do we ensure students don’t just speak, but build with us?

The first version was messy and experimental, but it was enough to get things moving.

That’s when I began working closely with two incredible students, Eric and Chloe from Homestead High School, who became our very first student ambassadors.

Together, we figured things out step by step: recruiting students, organising applications, forming teams, and setting up our Discord community

Growing the Program

Fast forward 1.5 years… We’ve now had over 120 student leaders from the USA, Egypt, Brazil, Malaysia, and more.

IQAPS projects follow a real-world product development cycle. Each cycle kicks off with onboarding and team formation. Students are then paired with Quizizz mentors : designers, researchers, or PMs and begin work.

The program’s duration is 2 months and follows two paths:

• Group projects : End-to-end feature builds in teams.
• Individual choice projects : Students explore design, research, development, or marketing projects whatever excites them most.

And these aren’t just hypothetical exercises. Students have contributed to features now live on Quizizz, including:

• Flashcards
• AI answer analysis
• Gamification understanding
• Voyage Math
• Question types
• Qbit’s gamification

Flashcards : An End-to-End Student Project Example

Flashcards was one of the projects. Here is an example of how one group followed an end-to-end, structured, research-driven process to improve Quizizz flashcards for real classroom use over four weeks-

• The group conducted a competitive analysis and thematic synthesis of multiple flashcard platforms.
• They followed up with classroom testing using structured interviews with teachers and students.
• Using the “How Might We” framework, they brainstormed and sketched product ideas like progress markers and hint layers inspired by user behaviour.
• Finally, the team built a collaborative pitch with a clear problem statement, annotated wireframes, and a step-by-step feature flow, which was shared with the product and UX teams for feedback.

This project showcased how student teams can apply real-world research and design practices from competitive audits to idea prototyping and contribute meaningfully to product development.

Students also picked topics across research, design, marketing, and development. Each student worked 1:1 with a Quizizz mentor to scope their project, build it out over four weeks, and apply what they learned.

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Why IQAPS Matters : For Students, and For Us

Over time, IQAPS has done something powerful. It hasn’t just helped us build better tools at Quizizz- it’s helped us build with the people who use them every day.

Students have pushed our thinking, spotted edge cases we hadn’t considered, and brought fresh perspectives that influenced real product decisions. Their ideas have made their way into live features, product strategy decks, and countless Slack threads.

And for the students? It’s been more than just a program.

IQAPS has given them hands-on experience with real-world product design, research, development, and marketing. It’s helped them build portfolios, grow confidence and even shift how they see themselves -not just as learners, but as builders.

If you’re a student reading this : We want you in the room. Not just to test features, but to help invent them. To co-create, challenge, and shape what learning can look like.

That’s what IQAPS is about.

Acknowledgments

Here’s to everyone who made IQAPS what it is today: a thriving, student-powered program that’s built with care, creativity, and collaboration.

The program wouldn’t be what it is without the amazing contributions of these people : Chloe Kim, Eric Sanghyuk, Arjav Jain, Bhavika Maheshwari, Malaika Sujeet, Aman Awasthy, Suvasish Sahoo, Chandrasekhar Ramanujan, Chinmayee Adhvaryu, Shreyas Gupta, Cassandra Rose Holt, Abhijeet Kumar, Ayushi Bothra, Pranav Goyal, Arpitha Gowda.