The Platform · how it works

Platform architecture

What each page does, what the platform stores, where every piece of data lives, and which page reads or writes it.

1. The big picture

reads (blue)writes (orange)
The website is only files; it has no server of its own. Every page talks directly to Firebase: it signs in (students and teachers invisibly, the content team with email and password) and reads and writes the Realtime Database over one live connection. Changes appear on other screens within a fraction of a second.

2. Data map: what is stored, and who reads or writes it

R the page reads it W the page writes it RW both. All of this lives in the Firebase Realtime Database (in Demo mode, in the browser's own storage instead).

Students are anonymous everywhere: a name like "Blue Falcon 7" only identifies someone inside one game. No email, phone or real name is stored for students.

3. A live game, step by step

The teacher's browser runs the game: it keeps the answers private, starts each question, and scores the answers when the time is up. Answer times come from Firebase's own clock, so they cannot be faked on a phone. Each phone listens only to the current question and its own score, so every extra player adds only a small, fixed amount of traffic.

4. Why it scales

Pages download the question bank one grade + subject at a time. With 50,000 questions across 40 subjects, opening the host page still downloads about 1,000 questions, not 50,000.

Built in

Split question bank: every question and learning outcome has a grade + subject key with a database index; pages load only what they show.
Catalog: a small outline rebuilt automatically after every import, approval or edit.
Small live traffic: phones listen to the current question and their own score only.
Date-indexed reads: leaderboards and Insights download only the chosen period; the review queue only the chosen status.
Clean-up: old live-game records can be deleted from the admin portal; leaderboards and Insights keep their own copies.
Stable IDs: question IDs never change, so reports and exports stay valid for years.
One design file (css/theme.css) and one settings screen (admin portal) instead of edits across many files.

Limits to plan for

Free Firebase plan: 100 devices connected at the same time (about 2–3 classes playing at once), 1 GB stored, 10 GB downloaded per month. The pay-as-you-go plan raises this to 200,000 connections.
Insights read raw answer rows. Beyond roughly a million answers per period, switch to daily summaries or export to Google BigQuery.
No accounts: students can't be followed across games, and the answers in the bank can be read by anyone who knows how. Add accounts + Cloud Functions when needed.

5. Where files come from

What	From	Used by
Pages, styles, scripts, sample lesson	Your website (e.g. Firebase Hosting)	All pages
Fonts (Baloo 2, Figtree)	fonts.googleapis.com	All pages (set in css/theme.css)
Firebase SDK (sign-in + database)	www.gstatic.com	All pages, only when Firebase is configured
QR code maker	cdnjs.cloudflare.com	host.html (lobby)
Excel reader and writer (SheetJS)	cdnjs.cloudflare.com	admin.html, insights.html
Office.js (talks to PowerPoint)	appsforoffice.microsoft.com	addin.html (the PowerPoint add-in)
Browser storage	The device itself	Rejoin after refresh (play), sound settings, "My suggestions", Demo mode data