For School IT Administrators

Approving Pixel Game Lab on your network

Pixel Game Lab is a browser-based game design and pixel art tool used in schools and after-school programs, built by Game Design Academy®. This page has everything you need to review and allow it on student devices. If anything here is missing, please contact us and we will answer the same day.

1. Domains to allow

Pixel Game Lab runs entirely in the browser over standard HTTPS on port 443. No installation, no extension, and no plugin is required.

Please allow all three required domains together. Allowing only pixelgamelab.com results in a page that loads but cannot sign anyone in and shows no artwork — which looks like a broken site rather than a filtered one.

Domain	Purpose	Status
pixelgamelab.com	The application itself (also serves www., which redirects here).	Required
kdyxrsqegockezuehqaq.supabase.co	Sign-in and all account data. Blocked ⇒ students cannot log in at all.	Required
ced0cb7ea4c471c6958e4205bba714ee.r2.cloudflarestorage.com	All student artwork and images. Blocked ⇒ the app loads but every drawing, thumbnail and background is blank.	Required
challenges.cloudflare.com	Bot check shown only on the public sign-up form. Students sign in with a class code and never see it.	Optional

If your filter prefers wildcards, *.supabase.co and *.r2.cloudflarestorage.com are equally acceptable.

2. Allowing the creation tools without the public games catalog

Some districts allow classroom software but not sites where students can browse and play games. Pixel Game Lab supports that split, and the classroom work is unaffected.

Everything the curriculum uses — the Concept Art, Pixel Art, Level Design and Game Package tools, and playing a game the student has just built — lives outside the public catalog. Only the catalog of already-published games sits under /games.

Path	What it is	Needed for class?
pixelgamelab.com/games	Public catalog of published games — browsing and playing other people’s work.	No
Everything else	The four creation tools, the student’s own library and classes, and testing the game they are building.	Yes

If you block /games, this is what changes: students can still design, build, test and publish a complete game. They cannot browse the public catalog, and they cannot open a game once it has been published — including their own class’s. Teachers who want to show finished work to the class will need the catalog allowed, or can show it from a staff device.

We would rather tell you this than have it discovered mid-lesson. If the catalog is the only thing standing between your district and an approval, block it — the program works without it.

3. What we collect from students — and what we do not

Pixel Game Lab is built for children, and its data handling is deliberately minimal. Students in a school program are given accounts by their teacher; they never sign up themselves and are never asked for personal information by us.

No advertising, ever. There are no ads and no ad networks anywhere in the product.
No third-party analytics or tracking. We removed analytics entirely rather than track children. Nothing about student behaviour is sent to any outside company.
No email address or phone number is collected from students. School accounts are created by the teacher and used with a class code.
No student work is public by default. A game is only visible outside the class if it is deliberately published, and every publication is reviewed by a human first.
Published school work is credited collectively — for example “GDA Carlstadt students” — so no child is ever named on a public page.

Data stored for a school student: their name as entered by the teacher, their class assignment, and the artwork and games they create. That is the complete list.

4. Security, hosting and compliance

HTTPS everywhere. All traffic is encrypted; the site is served over TLS on port 443 only.
Data residency. Application and database hosting are in the United States.
Access control. Students see only their own work and their classmates’ work within their own class. Teachers see only their assigned classes.
Communication. Students have no open chat. Messaging and friend features are disabled for school accounts entirely.
Moderation. Every published game and every shared artwork is reviewed by a person before it becomes visible to anyone outside the class.
Deletion. Account and content deletion is available on request and is carried out immediately — see our data deletion page.
COPPA. The service is designed around COPPA’s data-minimisation requirements. Full detail in our Privacy Policy.

5. Data privacy agreements

Most districts cannot approve any service, however small, without a signed student data privacy agreement. We understand that and we are not asking for an exception.

We work with the Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC) National Data Privacy Agreement, the standard instrument used across US districts, rather than asking you to review a contract of our own. Where a district belongs to a state alliance, the National DPA includes Exhibit E, the General Offer of Privacy Terms, which lets other districts in that alliance adopt the same executed terms by countersigning instead of negotiating from scratch.

In New Jersey, that alliance is the New Jersey Student Privacy Alliance (NJSPA), run by NJETA in partnership with The Education Cooperative’s Student Data Privacy Alliance. If your district works through NJSPA and does not yet find us in the SDPC registry, submit a new request assigned to TEC and let us know — we will complete it from our side.

If your district uses its own agreement instead, send it to us and we will complete it. We would also rather answer your privacy questionnaire early than have it hold up a teacher’s request later — get in touch.

6. Device requirements

Any modern browser — Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox — on a Chromebook, laptop, desktop or tablet. The creation tools need a landscape screen at least 1000 pixels wide, which every school Chromebook comfortably exceeds. Phones can play published games but cannot run the creation tools.

Questions, or need something in a particular format? Email us — we are a small team and answer quickly. You can also read the School Partnerships page for how schools use Pixel Game Lab.