Prodigi is a Flex 4 application I developed for Mangahigh.com, – a powerful games-based math elearning system that features more than 12,000 questions with hints and worked solutions. Prodigi is adaptive, and increases question difficulty based on student performance. Take a look at the promotional video MH recently released on YouTube.com:

Behind the scenes Prodigi also deals with the question authoring and auditing workflow and has enabled Manga High’s teachers to rapidly develop an extensive database of challenging Maths GCSE questions that students all over the UK (and soon the US) can use for revision and GCSE learning.

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Prodigi, a key part of the new MangaHigh.com website, enables teachers to author GCSE Maths questions for every lesson of the National Curriculum. Then activities are dynamically generated for students in playback mode. Take a look at the promo video:

A lot of my work during 2009 has been the development of this Flex RIA Content Authoring System. Prodigi serves 3 purposes:

1. It dynamically generates interactive online Maths lessons for every topic and subtopic of the UK Maths GCSE National Curriculum. The student experience tracks student attainment and progress levels and adjusts it’s questions accordingly. It aims to help, challenge and improve student’s knowledge of GCSE Maths.
2. Prodigi sources it’s Maths questions from a database of hundreds of thousands of questions that have been submitted by Maths teachers. I had to develop an Author Mode for Prodigi to enable Teachers to create these questions. Author mode includes features such as multiple question templates and layouts, a complex equation editor, save and submission functions.
3. The third mode of Prodigi is Auditor Mode enabling the top Math’s Teachers/Professors at MangaHigh to quickly assess queued Maths questions, accept, reject, comment on them etc.

Prodigi is an example of an RIA that uses Flex for it’s strengths but doesn’t fall down by Flex overuse. The Flex app is a part of a larger PHP Application that is powered by the Zend Framework. The Flex part communicates with the PHP Application via Zend AMF (Flash’s Action Message Format).

I was commissioned by Manga High to:

• Design/conceive the technical infrastructure of Prodigi
• Specify the Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) and client/remote server communication protocols
• Build the Flex 4 client-side of the RIA: Playback/Author/Auditor modes; Modular Question Templates/Layouts; the application architecture.

This project has been a big success with the client and MangaHigh.com launched 23rd September 2009. There’s been a lot of press coverage about the new site, highlights include Maths Guru Marcus du Sautoy interviewed on BBC’s The Today programme, a slot on Channel 4 news, a Guardian newspaper article to name but a few.

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