How Goblins is Boosting Math Achievement at Deer Valley Unified

We first met DVUSD, a suburban, middle-income district just north of Phoenix, in April 2025, right at the buzzer for next-year implementations. But Deer Valley is a natural innovator, a lighthouse for what's to come for their neighboring districts, and was curious to take a look. Courtney Hoit, 7-12 Math Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Specialist, noticed immediately that Goblins was "completely different from anything we had seen before". So they put it in the hands of 5 teachers, and "were just blown away", especially once they gave it to students and saw their faces light up. They became one of our first big believers.

We started serving DVUSD's 42 middle schools in August. By the end of the year, the NWEA MAP test showed students blowing past the growth. As Erica put it after her third test window of the year:

It's hard to stress just how unusual this level of growth is. In the coming weeks, The University of Maryland will be releasing their ESSA Tier 2 peer-reviewed study comparing Goblins users to similar classmates with the same teachers. Here's a quick preview of the results from our own analysis of Deer Valley screener data:

• Goblins is far more effective screentime. Students solving just one to two problems per week gained about three extra months of math learning over the year. At ten problems per week — roughly 15 minutes — students gained more than six extra months, growing at 1.6× the rate of their non-using classmates and 1.8× the national average.
• We got high levels of growth for far more students than typical. Supplemental tools have a well-documented “five-percent problem”: in Khan Academy’s landmark 99-district study, only 4.7% of students used it enough to see the strongest gains. In Deer Valley, 55% of students hit the usage level linked to those same gains — about twelve times the reach — and 54% sustained it from fall all the way through spring. Great results only matter if kids actually use the tool. They did.
• The growth reached even the most vulnerable students. Students who started the year in the bottom 25% grew nearly as much as students in the top 25%, and gains held across grade, gender, ethnicity, and language — English Learners were actually slightly overrepresented among the heaviest users. This wasn’t a program that only worked for kids who were already ahead.

In Courtney's own words, "6 additional months of learning with just 10 problems a week, that's crazy."

The only explanation for this high level of growth is that Goblins transformed teachers' classrooms.

Deer Valley originally had Tier 2 support in mind. Such was the appeal of Goblins to the teachers, however, that once they realized Goblins could double as Tier 1 support, they organically pulled it into their classrooms.

At first, teachers replaced all independent practice done on paper with Goblins. In doing so, Goblins took grading off their shoulders, instead giving them instant analytics on student ability based on students' authentic process, which was insightful and more actionable than when they were viewing students' final submissions. It also took a lot of differentiation off their shoulders: the very same content became interactive, giving students real-time, 1-on-1 help when they hit arithmetic errors, or deep lessons that retaught more fundamental misconceptions.

All of this was aligned with their curriculum, Open Up Resources, further reducing the friction for teachers to deliver high-quality instruction aligned with their Tier 1.

But some teachers came to appreciate Goblins even more deeply. Goblins' real-time insights make it possible for teachers to use their classtime with more leverage, seeing in real-time which clusters of students are struggling with what, and who needs extra support. Renee Schuch, a 7th grade teacher with 32 years in the classroom, suddenly discovered her role in the class could be different — she was able to hover around the class, watching for signals via the app, and helping students or groups selectively, while every other student remained engaged and learning. In other words, Goblins "completely changed [her] teaching."

Ask anyone at Deer Valley what surprised them most, though, and they don't lead with the data. "The kids are the ultimate test," Courtney said. "The kids were ecstatic. They loved it."

Goblins helps students, like Marley in the video, make profound breakthroughs of transformation in their math abilities, and just as important, their math image. The way we do this is special to us: other apps leave the learning boring like broccoli and try to cover it in chocolate, known as "gamification". Courtney put special emphasis on the fact that Goblins is "not gamified":

Because Goblins gives students 1-on-1 help that meets them exactly where their pencil is, struggling students stop experiencing math as a series of public failures. The avatar circles where they went wrong, asks a question, and lets them try again. Dr. Gayle Galligan, Assistant Superintendent at Deer Valley, notes that this lets kids "fail forward."

Teachers hear the difference out loud: when students finish a problem, Erica says, "they'll even call whatever compliment they got across the room. You hear them celebrating their progress."