Early perspective
Long before Prizes After Class existed as a project, Zachary Obasiolu spent a lot of time noticing the small, ordinary ways that people respond to feedback. Who paid attention when their effort was acknowledged. Who quietly stopped trying after a stretch of unseen work. Who shifted their behavior when a small reward, a comment, or a recognition arrived at the right moment. None of this was unusual or surprising on its own — it was simply easy to observe in the everyday texture of school, sports, and family life.
Over time those observations started to feel less like background noise and more like a pattern worth taking seriously. The same dynamic kept appearing across very different contexts: outcomes were shaped, in real and visible ways, by whether or not effort was reinforced.
Pattern recognition
The pattern was straightforward, even if it was rarely named out loud. Behavior responds to reinforcement. People — and especially younger people still figuring out what kind of effort is worth continuing — respond to recognition, feedback, and small markers of progress. When those markers are consistent, engagement tends to deepen. When they are absent, engagement tends to drift.
This is not a clever insight. It is a description of something well understood in classrooms, on teams, and inside families. What was interesting was how often the systems built around students did not act on it.
The problem
Many of the systems that ask the most of students assume effort without reinforcing it. Show up. Try harder. Stay focused. Be consistent. The asks are reasonable, but the feedback loops behind them are often thin or invisible. Students can spend long stretches of time doing the right things without seeing any tangible signal that their work is registering anywhere.
When that gap stretches too far, motivation tends to soften. Not because students stop caring, but because the connection between their actions and any meaningful outcome becomes too abstract. The loss is rarely dramatic; it usually shows up as a slow fade.
Insight
Reinforcement, applied carefully, has a quiet but real effect. It strengthens the habits people are already trying to build. It encourages consistency in places where consistency is otherwise fragile. It helps participation feel like part of a larger story rather than a series of disconnected efforts. It is not a substitute for purpose, mentorship, or community, but it can be a useful layer underneath all of those things.
Response
Prizes After Class is one small response to that idea. It explores what happens when structured reward systems are tied to engagement and effort in ways that feel proportional, fair, and grounded. The goal is not to gamify learning or to reduce participation to a points contest. The goal is to make a thin but real connection between showing up and being recognized for it.
This work sits inside a broader set of related projects. Engagement on Snacks After Class and participation on Runstr can both translate into points, while Students Need More focuses on the broader development side — tools, guidance, and resources that help students grow over time. Together those projects form a small ecosystem in which Zachary Obasiolu and a handful of collaborators are trying to give student effort a few more places to land.
Continuity
Prizes After Class is still a project, not a finished system. It is being refined slowly, in small steps, alongside the other efforts inside Education Angel Group and adjacent experiments such as Aspiring Innovators. The aim is not to grow quickly or to claim more than the work has earned. The aim is to keep paying attention to how reinforcement actually shapes participation, and to let that attention guide what gets built next.
That ongoing attention — patient, honest about the stage of the work, and willing to be wrong — is the part Zachary Obasiolu cares most about preserving as the project continues.