AZ·QCM
March 2026
The problem
Holberton School runs without lectures, textbooks, or teachers explaining the material. Every Monday a new project drops, due Friday. We learn by searching, reading, and making mistakes. Every Thursday morning, the school runs a quiz to check whether the week's concepts have actually sunk in. The problem: no revision tool exists for our curriculum. No Quizlet, no Anki adapted to Holberton, nothing specific to what we study. Students arrived at the quiz without having practiced, not from lack of motivation, but because nothing practical existed to test their knowledge on the exact topics we had covered.
My approach
I wanted a tool students would actually use at 8am on the bus, not sitting at a desk. Mobile-first, no account needed, no friction. Pick the topics you want to revise, or all at once, answer four-choice questions, and at the end redo only your mistakes to identify your gaps precisely. Every topic maps directly to a chapter from our T1 curriculum, and every question is calibrated to what Holberton actually tests us on.
The POC
10 topics covering the entire T1 C curriculum: Pointers, Malloc and Memory, Function Pointers, Recursion, Variadic Functions, Arrays, Structures and Typedef, Valgrind, GDB, Strings. Around 130 questions in total. Topic selection, per-question progress bar, error-only mode to redo what you got wrong, dark mode. This POC covers the first semester in full. The second semester (Python, SQL, OOP, data science) is not yet integrated: the site works but is not complete.
What I took away
A tool that fits into an existing routine has far more impact than one that asks people to build a new one. Students already had the Thursday quiz in their week. The QCM slipped into that naturally, and it changed the way they prepared.
What I'd do in prod
The cheatsheets and the QCM solve two complementary problems: one to learn, one to test. In production, I'd link them in a full agentic pipeline. When a new lesson is published on cheatsheets.adamzou.fr, an agent detects it automatically, reads its content, extracts key concepts and checkpoints, generates the questions and four answer choices using the Claude API, matching the exact format of the existing QCM, validates the content for consistency, and deploys the new topic to qcm.adamzou.fr via SSH. Both sites evolve together, with no manual intervention. One trigger, two tools updated.