Acid–Base Lab
Strong and weak acids, dynamic equilibrium, titration curves, and the difference between equivalence point and end point.
A course companion for university lecturers
Make steady study visible.
Kompas Semester gives students a weekly rhythm of practice quizzes, typed notes, guided study prompts and interactive labs. It gives their lecturer an early view of who is keeping up and who has gone quiet, while there is still time to help.
It works alongside the institution's official LMS, not instead of it.
Snapshot as of 8 October 2026 · semester week 4
In use this semester
201
students signed up across 238 course enrolments
3
diploma-level pharmacy chemistry courses, with a fourth being set up at a second campus
71%
of enrolments have already earned engagement points
655
practice questions written across 41 weekly topics
Figures exclude test accounts. They describe use, not learning outcomes; see Evidence for what is and isn't known yet.
Why it exists
Two problems a lecturer can't see in time
Kompas Semester was built by a pharmacy lecturer for his own courses, with no dedicated developer support, to tackle two problems the usual systems leave invisible until results are in.
01
A mastery gap between coursework and the final exam
Comparing continuous assessment results with final exam performance showed a consistent gap: students could clear coursework without the mastery that holds up under exam conditions. Weekly, topic-scoped practice tied to the same learning outcomes lets students find and close gaps continuously, not at the final exam.
02
Large cohorts hide who is quietly struggling
One lecturer with a hundred students can't tell who has fallen behind until a test has already been failed. Attention goes to whoever asks. Kompas surfaces engagement as it happens, so outreach can reach the quiet student early.
SEE
Students see where they stand each week: points, badge, streak and a clear target for full marks this week.
ACT
They act on it with short, specific study tasks: a practice quiz, a typed note, a guided prompt, an interactive lab.
REPEAT
A new topic opens every week, and the habit carries the semester. Past weeks stay open for revision.
How it fits together
What a student does becomes points in the database. Points turn into feedback for the student and an early signal for the lecturer, and a new topic each week starts the loop again.
For students
A weekly rhythm, on any phone
Students sign themselves up, pick their courses and can install the app to their home screen. No app store is needed.
Each week, a clear target
- Practice quizzes for every topic, written from the course's own study guides and auto-marked. The first attempt is the one that counts.
- Typed study notes. Pasting is blocked on purpose, so notes are written in the student's own words.
- Guided AI study prompts for each week's topic, to use with the course's own NotebookLM study notebook.
- Badges and a streak that show progress across the semester. A badge, once earned, is never taken away.
- A daily learning update on the first open each day: points, badge, notes, quizzes and how far to the next tier.
Interactive labs for the hard-to-picture topics
Five standalone chemistry labs show what particles are doing inside a flask, and why a trend runs the way it does. Each is layered: core text at secondary-school level, with "Go deeper" and "Into the maths" for pre-university and degree level. The same lab serves a first-year student and final-exam revision.
- Atomic orbitals in 3D, atomic structure, periodic trends
- Acid–base equilibrium and titration curves
- Titration types and gravimetric analysis
See them move, then try one
Each lab below is recorded from the real thing. "Try the live lab" opens the actual lab right here, no sign-in needed.
Titration & Gravimetry Lab
Acid–base, precipitation, redox and EDTA titrations, and gravimetric analysis. Students add the drops themselves.
Periodic Trends Lab
Effective nuclear charge, atomic and ionic size, ionisation energy, electron affinity, electronegativity and polarity.
Atomic Orbital Lab
s, p and d orbitals in 3D from hydrogen to krypton, with energy levels, nodes and orbital shapes.
For lecturers
Who needs my attention today?
The lecturer's view answers that one question first, then shows how the whole course is doing.
The Students page
- Needs a check-in and Haven't started filter the roster to students who have gone quiet for more than five working days, or who never began.
- One-click nudges send a warm, bilingual (English and Bahasa Malaysia) email, at most once a week per student. The server decides who receives it, and every nudge is logged.
- Points next to quiz average separate effort from understanding.
- An A–Z or leaderboard view, visible only to the lecturer.
Insights, for decisions rather than decoration
Each panel answers a decision the lecturer actually makes:
- Cohort health: is the app being used, and is use holding up week to week?
- Weightage tracker: where the class stands on the 0.00–1.00 scale, and where it is heading at the current pace.
- Behaviour mix: are points coming from real study or from clicks? Flags when point values need rebalancing.
- Topics: flags quiz banks that are too easy, and topics students reach late.
How scoring works
Every point traces to a study behaviour
Points are calculated in the database from the raw record of what each student did. Each behaviour counts once per topic, so repeating it or leaving the app open earns nothing.
| Behaviour, per topic | Points |
|---|---|
| Take the practice quiz | 10 |
| Quiz score, first attempt | up to 15 |
| Write a note | 10 |
| Note length (full at 150 words) | up to 15 |
| Copy a guided study prompt | 8 |
| Open the weekly study notebook | 7 |
| Topic maximum | 65 |
Grounded in learning research
The largest share rewards retrieval practice, then writing in one's own words, then guided self-study. Retrieval practice and distributed practice are among the best-supported strategies in the research on how students learn.
Keeping pace counts
Engaging with a topic within a week of it opening earns full points; later engagement earns 80%. The penalty is deliberately mild, so a student who has fallen behind still has every reason to catch up.
Engagement weightage = points ÷ the course's maximum points
A number between 0.00 and 1.00, using each course's own maximum so every course is on the same scale. Badge tiers sit on the same scale: Wayfinder at 25%, Navigator at 55%, Voyager at 85%. The weightage is shown to students every day and can feed continuous assessment under the course's assessment plan. Official marks always stay in the institution's LMS.
Evidence so far
What we know, and what we don't yet
Four weeks into its first full semester, Kompas Semester has early evidence of use. Evidence about learning outcomes comes at the end of the semester. Here is the honest split.
KNOWN · 8 OCT 2026
Students are using it
71% of enrolments have earned points. Students have taken 217 topic quizzes, written notes on 139 topics and opened the study notebooks on 248 topics. Weekly active students rose through weeks 2 and 3. Practice quizzes earn the largest share of points in every course.
NOT YET KNOWN
Whether it raises attainment
Practice-quiz first attempts average 86–91%, too close to full marks to tell students apart, and preparing beforehand hasn't yet shown a difference in quiz scores. At the end of the semester each student's engagement will be compared with their test and exam marks.
Already refined in use
The scoring rules were reviewed in September: the late-engagement rule was softened, only first attempts now count, and badge thresholds were rescaled to each course's own maximum. The Insights page now flags easy quiz banks and click-heavy point patterns, so the next round of changes can be based on evidence.
Design principles & privacy
Built to inform outreach, not to punish
No shaming
Signals about a student exist to help the lecturer reach out. Nudge emails say "we're here to help", never "you are falling behind".
Achievement never goes backwards
A bad week can't take away a badge a student earned. Going quiet shows as a separate, temporary status, and progress is kept.
Status and achievement kept apart
"Are you keeping up right now?" and "What have you built so far?" are different questions, so they are answered separately.
Consent first
Students read a plain-language notice and tick to agree before an account exists. No institutional student ID is required.
Built with the PDPA in mind
Designed around Malaysia's Personal Data Protection Act 2010, as amended in 2024. Every table is locked so a student can only read their own rows.
No one can make themselves a lecturer
Lecturer accounts are granted on the server from an allowlist. There is no signup path or switch a student could use to claim the role.
For developers
Small, plain and open source
Kompas Semester is a single static HTML file and a Supabase backend. There is no framework and no build step. A lecturer can run their own copy, and a developer can read the whole app in an afternoon. The code is MIT-licensed.
Browser
- One static HTML file, vanilla JS
- Installable PWA
- Five standalone lab pages
- Records what students do; never computes points
Supabase
- Auth with email confirmation
- Postgres with row-level security on every table
- Scoring as chained SQL views
- Postgres functions for group actions
Edge functions
- send-nudges via Resend
- delete-student
- Both re-check the caller is a lecturer
- Frontend Static HTML, CSS and vanilla JS
- Backend Supabase: Postgres, Auth, RLS, views
- Email Resend, from a dedicated sending domain
- Hosting Vercel
- Labs Standalone pages, no backend calls
- Licence MIT
Known limitations, stated plainly
Built for one lecturer: courses aren't yet scoped to an educator, so a second lecturer needs a schema change first. There is no in-app quiz editor yet; question banks are edited in the database. There is no offline mode. The repository README documents these and every other trade-off in full.
Roadmap
What comes next
- Next
Outcome evaluation
Compare each student's engagement weightage with their test and final-exam marks at the end of this semester.
- Next
Server-side quiz marking
Mark quiz answers on the server as well as scoring them there, ahead of any use of the weightage in formal assessment.
- Next
Harder, more discriminating quiz items
Rework the banks the Insights page flags as too easy, so practice scores tell students apart.
- Later
More than one lecturer
Scope courses to their lecturer, add an in-app question editor, and make setup routine for a colleague's course.
- Later
A daily chemistry puzzle
A light, competitive daily game to bring students back between topics.
- Later
Bahasa Malaysia labs
Bring the bilingual treatment already used in nudge emails to the interactive labs.
Get in touch
Interested in Kompas Semester?
Whether you lead a programme, teach a course that could use it, or want to build on it, Auf would like to hear from you.
Academic leaders
A walkthrough of the evidence so far, the scoring rules and the data-protection approach.
Lecturers
Ask about setting up a copy for your own course, or running a pilot next semester.
Developers & collaborators
Open an issue or pull request on GitHub, or get in touch about the roadmap above.