abiklar, past Abitur papers as a phone game

November 4, 2026

The Abitur is the exam that ends German secondary school. The prompt to Codex, at five past five on 3 November:

look up all abitur exams of the past 10 years and basically test the user on it and if they fail, teach em. mobile first PWA

Codex asked which state and which subjects to start with. My answer: what? just everything across all subjects... that's not that much, especially if you focus on the actual exams and not the entire Lehrplan.

The first version was an archive

Forty minutes later it was live on my webspace. It had found 1,173 published task records from 2017 to 2026 in the archives of the IQB, the federal institute that sets the shared exam pool, and of Baden-Württemberg and Sachsen-Anhalt, and it built a catalogue around them: search by subject and year, bookmarks, an answer check against the official marking notes.

The first version on a phone: a beige page with the heading Heute ein Stück weiter, a large card Dein Abi wird machbar with a Jetzt loslernen button, a row of counters 1,173 original tasks in the archive, 10 years, 0 tasks done, and cards for Mathematik with 597 original tasks and Deutsch with 95. Bottom tabs: Übersicht, Prüfungen, Training, Fortschritt, Merkliste — The first version, from Codex's own check that evening. Not the live view: this one is gone.

Four minutes after it reported done:

wtf is this? a fucking dashboard? it's supposed to be a fun MOBILE FIRST!!!!! learning app not a pdf reader

Codex agreed it had built an exam archive instead of the game and started over around full-screen questions, with the papers moved behind the scenes as the source of them. The rebuild went live forty minutes after the complaint.

Miss, learn, try again

The game opens on a question, not on a menu. A round is five questions from mixed subjects, four answer tiles each, a button within thumb reach. A right answer is 10 XP. A wrong one does not just mark the right tile: a little blob gets worried, offers to show you the trick, and walks you through it in three steps. Then comes a second question about the same idea with different numbers. Getting that one is worth 5 XP.

abiklar on a phone, round 1, question 1 of 5, Mathe, Abi-Remix 2017: Welche Steigung hat der Graph an der y-Achse? Below, f(x) = 2 · e to the -0.5x and f'(x) = -e to the -0.5x. The tile m = 2 is marked wrong in orange, m = -1 right in green. A note says Fast. Den Trick kriegen wir raus, and an orange button Zeig mir den Trick — A maths question from a 2017 paper, answered wrong on purpose.

The explanation screen: a worried orange blob says Warte, ich zeig's dir. Heading Dein Aha-Moment, Ableitung und Steigung, step 3 of 3: Das nimmst du mit. Einsetzen in f'(x): f'(0) = -e^(-0,5 · 0) = -e^0 = -1. A box Merks dir so, and a purple button Jetzt probier ich's — Step three of the explanation.

Zweiter Anlauf, gleiche Idee, neue Frage: Und welche Steigung hat g an der y-Achse? g(x) = 3 · e to the -2x, g'(x) = -6 · e to the -2x, with answers m = 3, m = -2, m = -6 and m = 0 — The second try: same idea, new function.

The mix is wide. The next question in the same round was about the start of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Eroica, from a 2025 music paper, then Cézanne, Churchill on the arms race and Habermas on legitimation crises. Every question names the paper and the page it came from, and questions that still need work come back later under "Revanche".

Question 2 of 5, Musik, Abi-Remix 2025, Variationsprinzip in Beethovens Eroica: Welches Konstruktionsprinzip prägt den Beginn des 4. Satzes der Eroica? A box quotes: Nach dem Sturmlauf exponieren die Streicher im Pizzicato zunächst nur den kargen Bassverlauf (Basso del tema). Answers start with Ein Rondo mit unverändertem Volkstanz-Refrain and Eine Choralbearbeitung für Blechbläser — Question two, from a music paper.

End of round: a happy green blob, Runde 01 geschafft, Mehr drauf als vorher. 1 Fehler verstanden. Genau so geht Lernen. +45 XP verdient. 4 von 5 direkt geknackt, 1 im zweiten Anlauf verstanden, 1 Lerntag am Stück. Button Noch eine Runde — The end of the round: one mistake, counted as understood.

The next morning I cut the list down:

so far so good... I think we can leave out Latin, greek, russian, .... basically focus on the core abitur subjects although I do apreciate the foreign languages

Eighteen subjects stayed, English, French and Spanish among them, and saved XP and history survived the cut.

built: 3 November, 17:05 to 18:28 with Codex, first as an archive, then as the game; subjects trimmed on 4 November
questions: 172 in 18 subjects, adapted from 43 papers out of a catalogue of 1,173 published tasks (2017 to 2026)
per question: four answers, a hint, a three-step explanation, a rule to keep, a second question on the same idea, the source page
sources: IQB 72, Baden-Württemberg 60, Sachsen-Anhalt 40
made with: Gemini 3.8 Flash adapted the papers, a second pass checked the answers; plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, installs as an app and plays offline

Play abiklarin German; best on a phone

Still rough

"The past ten years" is thin at the old end: 68 of the 172 questions come from 2026 papers, four each from 2017 to 2020. Maths has 40 questions, Spanish four, everything else eight, so a few rounds in the same subject start repeating. The questions are adaptations written by a model, not the original tasks, and the app says so; the source page is there to check against. It is all multiple choice, while the real exam wants written answers, and the marking-notes check from the first version did not make it into the game. Small things: the explanation writes e^(-0,5 · 0) where the question set it properly, on a phone the "Merks dir so" rule sits under the button until you scroll, and "Fast", almost, greets any wrong answer, close or not. Progress lives in the browser only.