About PIE Framework
Portable Interactions and Elements (PIE) is an open source framework for building, distributing, and rendering re-usable UI elements and interactions for assessments
What is it For?
Challenges PIE Addresses
- • Assessment items don't look and behave the same way across different systems
- • Advanced, engaging interactions are difficult to create and share
- • Content portability between platforms is limited
- • Advanced scoring algorithms are hard to implement consistently
What PIE Provides
- ✓ A framework for developing re-usable assessment interactions
- ✓ An open source player for rendering assessments
- ✓ Tools for sharing assessments in a distributable format
- ✓ A suite of open source question types and UI components
How Does it Work?
PIE adopts web standards wherever possible and uses web development best practices to make development straightforward.
Custom Elements
W3C Web Components standard
ES Modules
ES6 preferred, CommonJS supported
JSON
For configuration data
NPM
Package management
The PIE Ecosystem
PIE Elements
A suite of open source question types and UI components
- Multiple choice
- Text entry
- Math expressions
- Drag and drop
- Graphing
PIE Players
Open source runtimes for rendering PIE items, assessments and tools and accommodations
- Framework agnostic
- Element loading
- Session management
- Event handling
PIE Author
Authoring components for creating and configuring PIE elements
- Visual editing
- Configuration UI
- Live preview
- Reusable components
PIE Tools
Development and packaging tools
- CLI tooling
- Module bundling
- Development server
- Package creation
Development History
The PIE Framework originated from work by CoreSpring.org in building authoring and rendering tools for assessment interactions. It was created as an open source project to help educators have better access to high-quality and more interactive assessment interactions, designed to be compatible with the approach suggested by Smarter Balanced in their ARI (Accessible Rendering and Interoperability) proposal.
Since those early days, PIE has been consistently developed and maintained by Renaissance (and before that Illuminate Education, which was acquired by Renaissance). Renaissance has invested in PIE's ongoing development, ensuring the framework continues to evolve with modern web standards and educational needs.
Today, PIE is the preferred framework for assessment items at Renaissance, powering assessment item delivery across their product portfolio including Star Assessments, DnA, SchoolCity, and Accelerated Reader—products used by schools worldwide. Beyond Renaissance, school districts leverage PIE to author custom assessment items tailored to their specific curriculum needs, and content providers have integrated PIE into their content management systems to deliver interactive assessments at scale.
Open Source License
Open Source: MIT & ISC Licenses
PIE projects are licensed under permissive open-source licenses (primarily MIT and ISC), allowing you to use, modify, and distribute PIE freely for any purpose, including commercial use, without fees or royalties.
- Use commercially without restriction
- Modify and customize freely
- Distribute as you wish
- No royalties or fees ever
- Keep your modifications private if needed