Mr. Brand, a digital marketing and experience designer, founded Kahoot with two colleagues in 2012. It has since raised about $6.5 million from its own employees, from the Research Council of Norway and from Northzone, a venture capital firm that was one of the first investors in Spotify, the streaming music service. The founders focused first on the American school market, introducing the product in 2013.

Mr. Brand previously developed games services for companies like Daimler and Unilever. He also worked on a marketing project to help family-run inns, scattered throughout the Norwegian fjords, become more collaborative — by talking up their fellow inn owners to guests rather than competing with one another on hotel amenities. Guests found the owners’ stories so compelling, Mr. Brand said, that they grew more interested in visiting other fjord hotels.

Mr. Brand’s expertise in identifying stimuli that can trigger powerful emotions came in handy as the co-founders were working on Kahoot. He said that some of his thinking was also inspired by a book titled “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”

“We are using music, timers and points, these emotional triggers,” Mr. Brand said. “We are not just designing for the logical sense,” but creating “for the emotional side — where you fall in love with what is going on.”

The brand’s novel social-learning story notwithstanding, Kahoot seems like a bit of a throwback to a more old-fashioned pedagogical approach: behaviorism. This is the idea of educators shaping student behavior by handing out gold stars, stickers, points and the like.

Readers who attended school in the pre-laptop era may have played classroom games like multiplication bingo, an offline exercise in which students win acclaim or prizes for being the quickest to remember their times tables. Today, students may use Ascend Math, a learning app that rewards students who complete a level by letting them play short video games.

Of course, points, bells, video game leaderboards and all sorts of other brain stimuli can become habit-forming — like ice cream. That does not make them good for students.