App Club was founded by Edward "Ed" Metz, Ph.D., who spent more than two decades at the U.S. Department of Education, where he managed the ED/IES SBIR program and founded the ED Games Expo.

He is now a Visiting Scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University. Over his career, Ed worked directly with hundreds of education technology startups developing research-based products that reached more than 130 million students and teachers.

Across that work, two persistent challenges kept appearing:

First, developers struggled to recruit schools and students to test emerging products across different settings. Without authentic user feedback, they often lacked clear information about whether a product was engaging, usable, effective in practice, or ready for broader adoption.

Second, even strong research-based products struggled to reach school leaders. Without better ways for schools to discover and evaluate emerging technologies, promising innovations can fail to disseminate, sustain, or scale.

App Club was created to address both problems.

Students are already using learning games, AI-enabled tools, and other education technologies. App Club gives them a meaningful role as trained, critical evaluators while providing developers and schools with practical feedback and evidence that has traditionally been difficult to collect.