Why we built StudyQuest360

I'm Joel Pettigrew. PettigrewLab is my family: my wife Cassandra, our kids, and me, building software together out of our house in Colorado. Partly to make useful things, and partly as a way to learn how real products get made: not just writing code, but figuring out a problem worth solving and shipping something people actually use.

The advice we started with was simple: pick a problem you personally struggle with. In our house, that problem was staying on top of homework - a familiar one for a lot of families. So the first version, in July 2026, was just a tracker - a way to see what was assigned and what was done. That tracker is still in there; it's the assignment tracker everything else grew around.

But tracking homework quickly ran into the real issue: some of it was just hard. So it grew a study side - and then a specific idea that turned out to matter a lot. Instead of explaining a concept the same way the textbook already had, what if it explained it using something the student actually cared about? Basketball. A video game. Wizards. The same idea, told in a language they were already fluent in.

From there it got playful. We built a few small games that quietly reinforce the exact topics from a student's assignments, so reviewing for a quiz and beating a level became the same activity. And the games did their job a little too well - which led to the last piece: letting a parent lock the arcade during school hours, so game time stays a reward for studying instead of a temptation in the middle of class.

Put all of that together - tracking, study help explained in a kid's own interests, games that reinforce real schoolwork, and controls that keep it healthy - and you get StudyQuest360.