Pickatale — Educational Platform for Schools

Pickatale is an award-winning reading platform designed to make learning fun for children and effective for teachers. It offers a vast library of interactive books, quizzes, and learning tools used in schools across Norway and beyond. The platform helps teachers track progress, assign reading tasks, and engage students through gamified learning.

Client background

Pickatale is a leading edtech company focused on promoting literacy through interactive reading experiences for children. To expand its reach into schools, the company required a robust ecosystem that could handle both mobile and web applications — including APIs for the student app, teacher dashboard, and administrative tools — all while maintaining high performance, security, and scalability for tens of thousands of active users.

Business challenge

The challenge was to build a complete digital infrastructure from scratch that would serve as the backbone for multiple Pickatale products. It required a powerful API for the mobile reading game, a teacher dashboard web application, and a full-featured admin panel — all integrated into a secure and scalable cloud environment. The system also needed to support real-time updates, data synchronization, ERP integrations, and monitoring at scale.

Implementation

I architected and developed the entire back-end system from scratch using Node.js, Express, GraphQL, and TypeScript, implementing services such as authentication, user management, homework, books, and quizzes. The system was built on a microservices architecture following the CQRS pattern with communication over NATS. Data was stored in DocumentDB (MongoDB), files in AWS S3, and search functionality was powered by Elasticsearch.

The cloud infrastructure was deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and EKS (Kubernetes) for scalability and reliability. A CI/CD pipeline was set up with GitHub Actions and AWS CLI, enabling seamless delivery across all environments. System observability was achieved through CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray. Additional integrations included Stripe for payments, Zendesk for support, and Feide ERP for Norwegian school user synchronization. The front-end for both the teacher dashboard and admin panel was developed with React, ensuring an intuitive, responsive, and performant user experience.

Value delivered

The new architecture empowered Pickatale to handle over 10,000 daily active users smoothly and scale effortlessly as usage grew. Teachers gained an all-in-one platform to assign reading tasks, monitor student progress, and manage content, while the admin panel enabled efficient operations and support. The solution provided Pickatale with a robust, scalable, and maintainable foundation that continues to support the company’s international growth and educational mission.