A video game to learn how to love math

Why would you rather play your favorite video game for four hours straight rather than do math exercises? The question was the starting premise for the entrepreneurial bet behind Math Legacy, an Italian startup founded in June 2023 in Maruggio, near Taranto, by Fausto Capriotti and Christian Pulieri (photo), CEO and CTO, respectively, of the fledgling firm. The startup's mission is "to help millions of students around the world love mathematics", says the CEO.

Math Legacy is an app that transforms math exercises into multi-level video games, replicating the mechanics of video games, so students have fun, get feedback and feel part of something bigger than themselves. “Users are the guardians of mathematics, called to take care of Maffy, which embodies the essence of math in our universe. It's a ball of energy that behaves like a Tamagotchi, so it gets sick if the user doesn't do math exercises,” says Pulieri. 

The app, available for Android and iOS, operates according to a freemium model. It has a free section, but to unlock all the features you need a subscription. Potential customers are individual students, schools, companies. Schools also have access to the teacher platform, where teachers can see scores and give assignments, and pay a lower price by purchasing a bundle of licenses. Companies can include Math Legacy in welfare plans for employees' children, sponsor in-person events in schools and donate the app to institutions, thus investing in the attainment of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) #3 (Health and Well-Being), #4 (Education), and #5 (Gender Equality). In fact, the startup contributes to the mental health of young people because it reduces students' anxiety in dealing with mathematics; it enables a 22.6% improvement in math skills in a month and a half of use and promotes gender equality. Eventually, the video game will also tell the stories of women in mathematics, who will act as role models for female students.

In July 2024, Math Legacy received two prestigious awards: the Professionalism Award given by Rotary and the 2024 Myllennium Award in the MySocialImpact category. Today Math Legacy depends on the work of around ten collaborators, including developers, marketers and game designers.

Fundraising was the main challenge for the startup. So far Math Legacy has obtained €30,000 euros from B4i (Bocconi for Innovation) as part of its incubation path and another €30,000 from FuturED, the EduTech accelerator of Italian investment bank CDP (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti), where undertook a new acceleration path in March 2024. The first incubator to believe in Math Legacy was Bocconi, which offered the startup pre-acceleration and acceleration paths between February and June 2023 and between September 2023 and January 2024, respectively. “B4i helped us a lot in the change of mindset from product creators to entrepreneurs. The developer wakes up in the morning thinking about features to develop or bugs to solve, while the entrepreneur thinks about revenues, which are the lifeblood of the company. Bocconi’s incubator also supported us in managing projects and networking with many other great entrepreneurial realities. For us it was very stimulating to come into contact with startups at a similar stage of development, not only to learn, but also, more simply, to feel less alone", concludes Pulieri.