Tziyun B'Rega

Grading paper multiple-choice exams, with no internet needed

The name is Hebrew for “Grade in a Moment”.

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The problem

Chareidi schools in Israel give their exams on paper, and checking a stack of them by hand takes a long time. The answers are marked by real people, not machines: students tick, in pen, by hand. They tick a small box next to the answer they choose. Software built for perfectly filled-in circles does not cope with that. And it had to work on the school's own computers, without needing the internet.

What we built

We built one Windows program for the whole routine. The teacher prepares an exam, prints it, and later feeds the completed papers into the school's scanner. The program knows which exam each page belongs to, reads the ticks, and shows every student's grade. When it is not sure about a mark, it does not guess: it shows the mark to the teacher, who decides. Scanning and grading work without any internet connection.

Internet needed to grade: None
Reads: Hand-drawn ticks, in pen
When it is unsure: Asks the teacher
Language: Hebrew, right to left

The story behind it

The story: reading real ticks on real paper

Most grading software is built for the answer sheets you know from standardized tests, where everyone fills in a perfect circle. Our exams are different. They look like normal exam pages, with a small box next to each answer, and the student simply ticks it. Every student ticks a little differently. We built the reader around real human handwriting, not around a perfect circle.

Every printed page also tells the program which exam and which copy it is, so a teacher can feed the papers in any order. And we decided early that when the program is unsure about a mark, it says so and asks the teacher, instead of quietly giving a wrong grade. The result is a tool a teacher can use without becoming a computer expert.

Behind the scenes

All behind-the-scenes stories

"Why can't you just scan it?" How Tziyun B'Rega beganIt started with one email asking a simple question. The studio's account of the first search, a lottery-ticket comparison, a childhood memory of bubbles, and why we built our own reader.

How we chose the tools: Tauri, Electron, then Wails and GoWe started with Rust and Tauri, went back to the tools we knew, and ended up with Go and Wails, which we never planned. The lesson: pick tools you can deliver with.

Why we left Electron: the exam that moved on the pageTziyun B'Rega printed exams through a hidden Chrome window, and later pages drifted. We tried LaTeX twice, then found Folio, Go and Wails. The project history shows the path.

Printing without the print dialog: learning from how Chrome does itThe first idea was to hand printing to the operating system and let people sort out the options. That was a mistake. Here is how we cut the choices down to three, and how reading Chromium's source helped.

Finding the scanner, and taking over its settingsA teacher should press one button and get a scan. Behind that button are a search for the scanner, a list of settings nobody should have to touch, and a Windows firewall surprise.

Building Windows software from a Mac: a borrowed computer, a virtual machine and a photo of an errorSchools run Windows. We work on a Mac and Ubuntu. This is how Tziyun B'Rega learned to build and test for Windows, and the photo that taught us the most.

A mouse pointer that looked wrong on WindowsThe same program can look different on every operating system. One day the mouse pointer changed on Windows, so we chose our own pointer and learned to test the small things.

Watching a school computer from far away: what the logs taught us about small computersTziyun B'Rega sends its logs home so we can see it work where we cannot visit. A small computer in a remote town showed us that a computer's size, and in the end its processor, decides how well the program runs.

Offline first, but is it really always offline?Tziyun B'Rega works without an internet connection, but a few features need one. Telling the two cases apart turned out to be harder than we expected.

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