Biro

Biro is the GCSE revision app I wanted and couldn’t find: a companion that marks your answers the way an examiner would, keeps your streak honest and pays you in cards.

How it works

• Marking. You answer exam-style questions, typed or photographed, and Biro marks them the way an examiner would, then explains what you missed.
• A path that moves. The order of topics rebuilds itself around whatever you keep dropping marks on, rather than marching everyone through the same list.
• Reasons to come back. Daily packs of collectable cards, a market where you haggle with a bot, friends, and a binder to fill. Rewards are checked by the server, so they can’t be faked from the phone.
• Safe by design. It’s built for under-16s: safeguarding alerts to a named adult, filtered social features, and AI providers that keep none of your answers.

Before it was Biro

From May to September it was called GradeUp, and for most of that time its page on the first version of this site was a placeholder on purpose, titled “Quiet until it ships”. What it said then still holds:

• It was the only thing I worked on where the deadline belonged to somebody else. Exams do not move.
• It taught me more than anything else about the gap between a thing being good and somebody actually coming back to it tomorrow. Those are not the same problem, and only one of them is solved by working harder on the product.
• It is the only project of mine that has to be right rather than interesting. People are going to sit real exams having trusted it.

That page promised the real write-up at launch: how it works, what it looks like, and what I got badly wrong in the first version. This page is the start of that.

Where it is

Biro started as GradeUp in May. It’s now in its last checks before TestFlight, with the App Store setup, payments and safety reviews done in code, and the launch on the @itsevanrico channel planned.