Mr Iyer read the room code over the coach PA at 9:12 AM: "TRIP-22." Forty-three Year 7 students joined in four minutes. Round one started at 9:16. They ran a relay bracket across three rounds. When the coach pulled into the science centre car park at 11:08, twelve students were still mid-game in the semifinal. Nobody wanted to stop. The journey had become the thing.
verified_user Works on bus WiFi or mobile data · No prep before the trip
TRIP-22 · Coach Tournament
43 PLAYERS🚌 Still mid-bracket when they arrived. Nobody noticed the journey.
Mr Iyer teaches Year 7. The science centre trip was a full-day outing, the kind of trip that's genuinely valuable and genuinely hard to manage logistically. His preparation included the usual materials: worksheets for the visit, emergency contact lists, permission slips. He had not planned anything for the two-hour journey each way.
He'd trialled Kidoku with his maths class the previous month as a five-minute starter. He knew it worked. Five minutes before departure, on the coach, he created a room on his phone, wrote TRIP-22 on a bit of paper so he wouldn't forget the code, and waited until the coach left the school gates.
At 9:12, he read the code over the PA. By 9:16, forty-three students were in the room. He had set up 8×8 Classic — Year 7s could handle it — and the first round started on its own. No instructions needed. The top 16 finishers advanced to a second round. He told the class that the person who won the semifinal would get to read out the final room code for the return journey. That was all the incentive required.
The noise level on the coach changed. The usual background hum of headphones and scattered conversations — which coaches amplify — became something different. Students were talking to each other about strategy. Seat assignments suddenly mattered because two students sitting next to each other were comparing approaches.
When they arrived at the science centre at 11:08, twelve students were mid-game in the semifinal. Three students groaned audibly when Mr Iyer called time. He promised the return journey would have round three.
On the return trip, he ran the final. Students who had already been eliminated were watching the leaderboard on his phone, which he held up periodically so the back rows could see. SpeedSeat12 — the student in seat 12, a Year 7 boy who otherwise did not participate much in class — won the tournament by eight seconds. The coach erupted. His form teacher, sitting three rows back, made a note to follow up on that.
No preparation before the trip, no equipment needed on the coach. Create the room on departure. The bracket runs itself.
Create the room as students board. Read the four-letter code over the coach speaker system. Students join within two minutes — they're already on their phones. The tournament starts when you say go.
Round 1 for everyone (43 players). Top 16 advance to round 2. Top 8 advance to the semifinal. Create a new room for each round. The bracket structure runs over 90 minutes without filling the full journey — the return trip holds the final.
The student who wins the semifinal on the outward journey earns the privilege of reading the final room code on the PA for the return trip. This incentive produces immediate, genuine buy-in. Teachers have reported zero behavioural issues on journeys running this format.
Coaches rarely have reliable WiFi. Kidoku Live is optimised to run on individual mobile connections — students use their own data (or the teacher shares a hotspot). The game works perfectly at 4G speeds.
No team management, no scoring sheets, no distributing materials. The room code joins all 43 students into the same session. The live leaderboard tracks positions automatically. Your job is just to read the code and let the game run.
On a maths trip, winning a logic tournament is relevant. But students don't experience it as schoolwork — they experience it as competition. The constraint-elimination thinking they're using is the same thinking the science centre is about to teach. They arrive primed.
TRIP-22 · Final Standings
SpeedSeat12
Outward journey champion · Seat 12
8-sec margin
GridKing09
Read the return code for the final
2nd overall
PuzzleFox44
R1: 14th → Final: 3rd
Best journey arc
The form tutor made a note about SpeedSeat12. A different side of a student.
School trips involve safeguarding considerations. Any app used on a trip must meet a minimum safety bar. Kidoku Live meets it without requiring any IT department review.
No personal data collected — auto-generated usernames only. No real names, emails, or school details required.
Private rooms only — four-letter code controls access. No stranger can enter the school's tournament session.
No chat, no external links — the game is the entire interface. Nothing inappropriate can be accessed through Kidoku during the journey.
That is the problem it solves: 43 students on a two-hour coach, engaged, competing, building social vocabulary around the trip they're already on. Nothing to prepare. Nothing to pack. Just the room code and the PA.
Everything you need to know about Kidoku Live for this use case.
Kidoku Live is purpose-built for this scenario. The teacher creates a room on kidoku.app/live, reads the code over the coach PA, and students join on their own phones within minutes. A relay bracket tournament — round 1 for all, top 16 advance to round 2, and so on — fills a 2-hour journey and arrives at the destination still mid-competition.
Yes. Kidoku Live is optimised for mobile connections and uses less than 1MB per session. Standard 4G mobile data on a moving coach is sufficient. Students use their own data — there is no requirement for coach WiFi. Groups where students share mobile hotspots also work without problems.
Private rooms support up to 20 simultaneous players. For whole-coach tournaments (30–50 students), the teacher creates sequential rounds with different room codes, taking the top finishers forward. This relay bracket structure can be run by a single teacher from their phone with no additional equipment.
Yes. Zero personal data collection, no chat feature, no external links, auto-generated usernames. Students interact only with the puzzle and the leaderboard. There is nothing accessible through Kidoku Live that school safeguarding policies would restrict.
Players who lose connection during a session can reconnect and continue from where they were. The session does not end if one player drops. If connection is lost entirely for a player, they simply rejoin at the next available opportunity. The game is designed to be resilient to mobile connection interruptions.
School trips are planned for the destination. The journey is forgotten by Tuesday. Unless you ran a 43-player live tournament on the coach. That one sticks.
No preparation · Works on mobile data · 43 players simultaneously