This is the guide we send parents who email us the week they move a child off Prodigy. It is opinionated, it is specific to Infinilearn (which we make, so disclosure applies to every sentence), and it is built around one fact we have learned the hard way: the first ten minutes decide everything. A child who bails on day one is twice as hard to bring back. So most of this playbook is about day one.
Before You Start: Is Your Child Ready?
Infinilearn is built for grades 4-9. A child in 4th grade or above who has finished Prodigy, gotten bored of it, or started calling it a little-kid game is the exact player it was made for. A strong 3rd grader can work too, with a caveat we will get to in the grade section. A child in 2nd grade or below should stay on Prodigy or another elementary game for now; we would rather say so than have them bounce off problems written for older kids.
If you are not sure, our guide to the signs a child has outgrown Prodigy is a five-minute read.
Step 1: Pick the Account Type
There are two ways in, and the right one depends on how involved you want to be.
- Parent account first. Create a parent account, add your child with their first name and grade, and hand them the login. You get the free parent dashboard for one child from day one: accuracy by topic, strengths, weak spots, problems solved, recent activity. This is the route we recommend for anyone coming from Prodigy, because the dashboard is the thing Prodigy parents tell us they missed most.
- Student account first, link later. Your child signs up as a student with a username and PIN, picks their grade, and starts playing. You can create a parent account afterward and link to their existing username. Good for a kid who wants to try it before you commit any setup time.
Either way, the whole game is free. There is no trial period and no content that opens later.
Step 2: Choose the Grade
Pick the grade your child is in right now, 4th through 9th. Not the grade they test into, not a grade below to be safe. The game adapts inside a grade, starting with that grade's most approachable topics and moving up or down based on answers, so giving it the right target matters more than giving it an easy one.
Two special cases:
- A 3rd grader who has genuinely finished Prodigy. Start them at 4th. If the first battles are too hard, the game eases down into Foundations practice, real grade 2-3 skills like facts, place value, telling time, and fractions of a shape, and climbs back up as they answer correctly. But 4th grade content (multi-digit multiplication, fraction equivalence, angles, remainders) will arrive within the first week. If that sounds like a stretch, wait a few months. Hard on day one is how you lose them.
- Families outside the US. Match by age. US 4th grade is roughly Year 4 in Australia and Year 5 in England; the full table is on our after-Prodigy page. Year levels shift by state and birthday, so when in doubt pick by age and adjust from the dashboard later.
You can change the grade from the parent dashboard at any time. Nothing is locked in.
Step 3: The First Session, Minute by Minute
Plan for fifteen minutes, and plan to be in the room. Not hovering, not reading the problems over their shoulder, just present. Here is what the session looks like.
Minutes 0-3: a new character. Nothing from Prodigy carries over, and for most kids this is the best part. New world, new character, a fresh start with no old collection to feel attached to. Let them take their time here.
Minutes 3-8: the first battles. New players open with the most approachable topics in their grade. Nobody meets two-step equations on question three. Problems are mostly multiple choice, and every correct answer is an attack. A miss is not a dead end; the game simply serves something they can handle next.
Minutes 8-15: the first wobble. At some point they will miss one they should have gotten, or meet a problem that is genuinely at the edge of what they know. This is the moment the whole week turns on. Say one sentence: "The game gets easier when you miss. That's on purpose." Then let them keep going. Do not answer for them.
Stop while it's fun. End on a win, even if that means stopping at twelve minutes. A short first session that ends well beats a long one that ends in frustration, and it makes tomorrow's session something they ask for.
Step 4: Handling the First Hard Question
Some kids hit one hard question and shut the laptop. If that happens, three things to know.
- The game is already adjusting. Difficulty rises and falls with answers. A rough stretch drops the game into Foundations practice until confidence comes back, then it climbs. Your child does not have to do anything to trigger this.
- You can lower the grade. From the parent dashboard, set the grade one lower and try again tomorrow. Move it back up once they are cruising.
- Typed answers only appear at grade 9. If your child is in grades 4-8, every problem is multiple choice. The harder 9th grade problems require a typed answer so students cannot guess their way through, but a younger player will not see those.
What not to do: hover and feed them answers. The engine reads every answer as a signal about what your child knows, and a parent answering makes the game harder for the child the next day.
Step 5: The Prodigy Habits to Unlearn
A kid coming from Prodigy arrives with expectations, and a few of them point the wrong way.
- Pets are not the point. There is a pet, Finny the Axolotl, and there are cosmetics like fantasy hair colors and a gold name tag. They are Premium extras, they are visible to other players, and they change nothing about progress. The game is the quests, the zones, the bosses, and the gear earned by playing.
- There is no membership to chase. Every one of the 15 zones, every quest, and every boss is free. Your child will not be shown a locked area or a member-only reward, because there are none. If they ask what Premium is, the honest answer is "stuff for me, and some outfits for you."
- Missing is normal. Prodigy kids sometimes treat a wrong answer as a failure state. In Infinilearn a miss is information; it tells the game what to serve next. Saying that out loud once helps.
Day 7: Reading the Dashboard
After a few sessions, open the parent dashboard. The free view shows accuracy by topic, strengths and weak spots, problems solved, and recent activity. That is usually more than a Prodigy parent has ever seen about their child's actual math, and it answers the question you were really asking: is this helping?
What to do with a weak topic: nothing dramatic. The game already pulls problems from your child's weakest areas during battle, so the practice is aiming itself. If a topic is brand new to them, a ten-minute Khan Academy video before the next session does the instruction part, and the game does the practice part.
Premium, at $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year, adds practice-path controls (State Standards, Traditional, or Custom topics), progress trends over time, and unlimited children. You do not need it in week one. Decide after you have seen the free dashboard.
Device Setup
Infinilearn runs in any modern browser with nothing to install: Chromebooks, laptops, desktops, and Safari on an iPad. There is no native iOS or Android app yet, and the game is not designed for phone-sized screens.
If you lock devices down with Screen Time and do not want to hand over open Safari, there is a clean fix. In Screen Time, go to Content & Privacy Restrictions, then Content Restrictions, then Web Content, choose Allowed Websites Only, and add infinilearn.com. Your child gets the game and everything else stays locked.
If It Doesn't Stick
Some kids are not ready, and no playbook changes that. If a week in your child is not asking to play, take the honest read: the jump from an elementary game to grade-level math may be a few months early. Prodigy is still there. Come back at the start of the next school year, when their grade has caught up to the content, and try again with a fresh character.
And if something is rough in the transition, email the founder directly at adrian@infinilearn.com. Feedback from switching families is how this playbook got written, and how the game gets fixed.
The Bottom Line
Pick their real grade, stay in the room for the first fifteen minutes, say one sentence at the first wobble, and stop on a win. That is the whole playbook. The game handles the rest, and the dashboard tells you by day seven whether it is working. For the side-by-side comparison and the grade table, the after-Prodigy guide has everything on one page.