MICROSOFT ALUMNI NETWORK PHOTO | DAN DELONG

From left, Microsoft alums Eric Oemig, chairman and CTO, Mary Heuett Oemig, COO and general counsel and Stuart

Moulder, Boom Learning’s CEO. Boom Learning is a next-generation platform provider for teacher-created resources that was

co-founded by Eric and Mary.

Back to School

Boom Learning leaders create go-to online resources for teachers

By Brad Broberg
Microsoft alums Eric and Mary Oemig are on a mission to help students learn by helping teachers teach.

The Oemigs are co-founders of Boom Learning, a Kirkland educational technology company that provides teachers an online platform to create, buy and sell digital task cards.

Task cards are bite-size alternatives to worksheets for helping students practice and master new skills. Each card presents a question the student must answer or an activity they must complete before moving on to the next card in the deck.

Already a go-to resource for many teachers in paper form, task cards in digital form are even handier because they are interactive. 

Each deck of digital Boom Cards is essentially a mini-app that automatically grades each student’s performance, providing students and teachers alike with immediate feedback and an easy-peasy way to track progress – something schools are “dying for,” said Mary, general counsel and chief operations officer.
 
The Oemigs didn’t set out to build a business around digitizing task cards, but their determination to make a difference in K-12 education led them to cross paths with Rachel Lynette, a top seller of task cards on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Teachers Pay Teachers is an online marketplace where teachers buy and sell all sorts of classroom materials that they create. “Rachel was looking for a way to turn her (paper) task cards into an app,” Mary said.

Founded in 2012, Boom Learning failed in its first attempt to build a platform. “When I first started the engineering on it, we kind of crashed and burned because the tools we needed didn’t exist,” said Eric, chairman and chief technology officer.

But technology doesn’t stand still and when Eric went back to the drawing board in 2015, the barriers he faced before no longer stood in the way. After getting off the ground in 2016, the new and improved platform — which works with virtually any device or browser – began to soar in 2017. 

Boom Learning now has 5,000 paying subscribers and counting – all through word of mouth. “This is teachers telling other teachers this is the tool they’ve been looking for,” said Stuart Moulder, another Microsoft alum who joined Boom Learning as CEO in April. 

Stuart, a veteran computer gaming executive, was general manager of Microsoft Game Studios from 1994-2003. Not until joining Boom Learning did he become aware that there was a burgeoning market in teacher-to-teacher sales.

“It was sort of shocking to find out that there’s hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions ... where they’re buying and selling resources to help each other,” Stuart said.

Although their Microsoft careers overlapped, Stuart and the Oemigs did not know each other. Eric was a software development manager from 1991-1999 and a software architect from 2002-2003. Mary (whose maiden name was Heuett and who met and married Eric after he left Microsoft) was a senior attorney from 2002-2006.

Life after Microsoft included a term in the state Senate for Eric, who co-sponsored a bill to track student/teacher/school performance that was signed into law. Mary founded a co-operative school for gifted and talented kids 3 to 9 years old. Those experiences helped shape Boom Learning’s model of empowering teachers to develop the resources they need to excel.
  
“So much of what people are doing to try and help teachers is from the top down,” Stuart said. “Teachers know what they need to do. What they want is the latitude and the tools to be able to directly address their needs in their class with their students.”

The shared Microsoft DNA of Boom Learning’s management trio is a tie that binds.

“There’s just something special that connects people who worked at Microsoft, especially in the early days,” Eric said. “I always think of old school Microsoft ... as do the right thing.”

Stuart said, “It was always about the best idea, not who it came from.”

“And a willingness to take risks,” Mary added.

Eric and Mary started Boom Learning with their own money. Stuart and Rachel, who is an advisor, have small stakes in the company, which runs at a break-even pace. 

Having barely scratched the surface of a $10 billion market for supplemental teaching materials, the company is now looking for external investors to help it evolve and grow.

“All the listening and collaborating has led to a long list of things teachers want us to build and we need more engineers to build it,” Mary said.