Foundation for Mathematical Talents

The website of the Foundation for the Mathematically Gifted (MaTe - Matematikai Tehetségekért Alapítvány) is where the Math Kangaroo international mathematical competition is organized. On the website the nomination of the students, and the publishing of the result are both possible, furthermore, the connected desktop application scans through roughly 40,000 papers yearly and evaluates them through image recognition.

Math Kangaroo

The foundation was originally called Zalai Matematikai Tehetségekért Alapítvány (Foundation for the Mathematically Gifted of Zala), thus the website is still available on the domain zalamat.hu despite the growth and name change of the foundation.

Their goal is to support mathematically gifted youngsters by organizing learning opportunities, camps, and competitions for them. The foundation’s main activity is the organization of the Hungarian Math Kangaroo. At the competition students - depending on their age - have to choose the correct answer from 5 options for 24 or 30 mathematical questions. Their solutions are recorded by filling in the correct boxes on an answer sheet provided on paper.

New beginning

The MaTe system consists of the webpage’s content management system (CMS), the custom developed modules that aid in the organization of the competitions and the result announcement, and the desktop application that evaluates the scanned answer sheets. Originally, the three components were developed by different programmers. Through the years, the synchronization and maintenance of these components became more and more of a challenge. Therefore, the foundation comissioned our company to develop the system with a completely new structure with the original functionality, while maintaining the original appearance.

Accelerated process

The entry to the Math Kangaroo has been done through the website since 2010. On average, yearly 35,000 students’ entry data, answer sheets, and results are stored in the database. The processing of the amount of data tested the limits of the PHP based CMS more and more each year. Because of this, the current website and the custom modules were implemented in the .Net based Orchard CMS.

After conducting the competition, students’ answers must be evaluated in one week, and the results should be published as quickly as possible. The processing of the scanned documents is handled by the desktop application, which is directly connected to the database server. The WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application was written in C# and determines the results of the students with the help of a custom developed image recognition module. The students and their answer sheets are paired through the barcodes on the answer sheets. The system recognizes practically 100% of the marks on the answer sheets and multiple setting options and search functions are available to handle the detection and manual correction of the possibly arising problems.

The desktop application continuously refreshes the server’s data thus changes can be published with a simple setting. For example, to aid in manual verification, students can check the detected results of the system and have the option to notify the organizers about any inaccuracies. The actual point calculation and the determination of the ranking can also be started with one click, after the verification period is over.