Prototype
Arabic Math Input · A Tap-to-Build Equation Palette
A phone-first prototype that lets a student write worked math steps in Arabic without a keyboard — and sends the marking engine a semantic tree, not a picture.
Right-to-left math as a tree · zero reading errors by construction
The problem
Marking a student’s working, not just their final answer, needs the working in a form a machine can read. On a phone, in Arabic, that’s hard: math notation runs left to right inside right-to-left text, variables are Arabic letters, numerals may be Western or Eastern Arabic, and a typed string or a photo of handwriting both leave the marking engine guessing what the student meant.
What I built
A phone-first, right-to-left equation palette shaped like an exercise book: the problem at the top, the student’s steps accumulating beneath it, and a palette docked at the foot like a keyboard. Students build each step by tapping — digits, the Arabic variables س and ص, operators, and structures for fractions, powers, roots and brackets — with the active slot highlighted so they always know where the next tap lands.
Every step is stored as a semantic tree — a fraction with a numerator and denominator, a power with a base and exponent — and that tree, not an image or a string, is what the marking engine receives. There is nothing to misread, because nothing was ever read.
A numeral toggle switches between Western and Eastern Arabic digits, and a timer and tap counter per step measure what the palette actually costs a student to use.
The result
A working prototype that answers the engineering question — math input can be exact, right-to-left and keyboard-free — and surfaces the questions only teachers can answer. The prototype names them rather than guessing: which side of the base an exponent sits on in Arabic school writing, and which digit forms the Jordanian textbooks use.