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Building an Open Source "Clicker"?
fieldtest asks: "Most Slashdot readers have read about "clickers", remote control style devices that students use to wirelessly answer a teacher's questions. Unfortunately, as a college student, I have had less than stellar experiences with these clickers. I hear complaints from my professors and fellow students often as well. So, I want to build an open source clicker system for all universities to use. I believe that this is a prime opportunity to show how powerful free software can be.
So, what do the talented people of Slashdot recommend?"
"The problem is this: a clicker system requires...clickers. What I need are remote controls that have a minimum of 6 buttons (for users to select options with). The sticking point comes when a button is pressed -- the remote must send the option choice, as well as a unique ID specific to the remote, so the clicker software can distinguish between different students.
I've experimented and Googled around. I've tried standard TV remote controls combined with an USB-UIRT receiver, but the range was too low. Googling shows some interesting programmable remotes, but they're far too expensive ($100+) to have each user purchase one.
How should I go about building the perfect clicker and receiver system? Any suggestion is welcome, from IR to radio, from Bluetooth to ZigBee based communications. Recommend a commercial product, or a do it yourself solution. Please also recommend a receiver device, and a way to connect it to a computer. Also, if you recommend that I just build a custom circuit board for the remote control, please give some references and examples of how it should be implemented."
I've experimented and Googled around. I've tried standard TV remote controls combined with an USB-UIRT receiver, but the range was too low. Googling shows some interesting programmable remotes, but they're far too expensive ($100+) to have each user purchase one.
How should I go about building the perfect clicker and receiver system? Any suggestion is welcome, from IR to radio, from Bluetooth to ZigBee based communications. Recommend a commercial product, or a do it yourself solution. Please also recommend a receiver device, and a way to connect it to a computer. Also, if you recommend that I just build a custom circuit board for the remote control, please give some references and examples of how it should be implemented."
How much do you know about hardware and software? If you're good with one, get somebody who's good with the other to help you out. And make it run on ANY system (windows, linux, mac)
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
RF, Decent range, cheap, serialized, multiple buttons, multiple vendors, hardware isn't really going anywhere fast, sometimes can be "secure"
There is a project currently in progress to write a program using mobile phones as clickers via bluetooth.
They're full featured, do everything necessary, and in the vast majority of cases STUDENTS ALREADY HAVE THEM.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of it being open source - it was distributed at a conference at the start of September..
It wont be a single person job as far as i can tell and you will probably need some initial financing as well... Also, tell me where to sign up! :)
It occurs to me you might be able to do something with cheap X10 remotes- but you'd be limited to 16 students per class, or alternatively, using the 8 button keychain remotes programed to split each housecode into 4 students for a total of 64 addresses (4 on, 4 off per student). That's still pretty small for some college classes- but at least it's reasonable on price. There are now whole-housecode recievers and the software is just interpreting a serial stream.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Hay, someone needs to make me a clicker!!!!111one
My friend has a class that uses these for exams. I don't see how this can possibly be a good idea, especially if the means to modify them is trivial at best.
... raising your damn hands and grunting "ooh, ooh." Don't forget to do the pee-pee dance.
My school has this.. its pretty gay, desnt work right and each department has their clicker that they want you to use, and it changes it semmester. but I guess I didnt really answer the question.
I think you're missing the point here. Most people who have problems with clickers won't find those problems disappearing with an "open-source" clicker. Their problems are either with the hardware (which it seems you are not trying to improve), or with the whole concept of using clickers.
Personally, as an educator, I would find clickers to be a nuisance, and wouldn't find them useful anyway. It is far more effective to try to interact with the students and understand where their learning is at, individually, then tailor my teaching to whatever common problems or such need the most attention.
Put the room on springs.
Put a giant bar magnet with the north pole facing down in the ceiling.
Give each student a bar magnet. Mark the south pole "yes" and the north pole "no".
Students hold their magnets in the air to indicate the answer.
If the room moves up, the majority of the students chose "yes". If it moves down, the majority of the students chose "no". The more it moves, the more the students are in agreement.
Best of all, the batteries will never die.
Unless you drop the answer sticks.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Q: "How do I get the smart slashdot folks to help me with my class project?"
A: "Tell them that I'm gonna make it Open Source!"
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CY7C601xx
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Development kit: CY3655 $350
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"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
way to go training students to be just numbers that are counted instead of individuals who actually raise their voice.
this whole idea is perverted.
There's this one option that is free and widely available: it's called voice.
If you make just dumb wireless wands, except for a unique serial number, then it comes down to the software for managing the registration of the wands, and capturing the data.
It would seem like you're going to have to deal with a lot of input at once (i'm forseeing about 200 simultaneous..) so your RF communication is going to have to be pretty smart to be able to deal with all that interference.
the wands should be transmit only, to save cost and limit complexity. You could limit the number of simultaneous broadcasts per "channel" by including some sort of user-modifiable channel-selector or encryptor, ala a garage door opener.
Spread-spectrum broadcasting might be a good fit as well, along with multiple-diversity receivers.
A good smart receiver, maybe even a software radio, might be able to be trained to handle the inputs.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
unless you use phones or whatever.. or you could just assume people to have wap or whatever and send the answers through whatever wireless internet connectivity they have.
..and somehow free software should do it? yikes. look for poll systems, because that's what it is(and largely hardware tied).
seriously though, you want hardware for a pretty specific use..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Students raise hands and shout "ME ME ME ME ME!!!!" when they get the answer.
sulli
RTFJ.
1. Get bent, my university (Univ of Texas at Austin) uses these clickers for physics and students hate them because profs use them to take attendance 2. You obviously have it good at your univ because the clickers they make us buy here cost around $70 3. The physics department has it so good here, they have this automated hw/exam system in place that dynamically generates problems using different numerical values for each student. They use it for hw and for exams, the profs never have to think of questions or worry about grading anything 4. Did I say get bent?
Why not approach this from a different angle?
Instead of using the closed system approach currently being utilized,
keep going with the "Open" method you are attempting to use.
The first thing that comes to mind is to use WiFi (802.11 a, b, or g) as the receiver.
This will keep the delivery systems open to laptops, PDA's, etc.
There are also Wifi capable "clickers" available.
A growing number of students are using laptops as a standard tool.
Why not let those students have a small application that allows selections.
The "clicker" units can still be used and available to students who can not or do not wish to carry a laptop or PDA.
This solves the range problem, receiving hardware is very inexpensive,
and I'm sure with a large enough quantity the "clicker" price will drop to a very reasonable level.
MAC addresses can be used as the ID, though I would not recommend forgoing authentication.
A nice side effect is fewer pieces of equipment students have to worry about.
Adding bluetooth receivers would also allow a wider range of PDA's and some cell phones too.
My question is why does it HAVE to be wireless? why couldn't you add it on to the desks/tables/etc.? it'd be much simpler/cheaper to design it to work over wires (though it would still take alot of wires for a sufficiently large classroom). This would prevent any problems with range or interference from other students that IR or RF can have.
get a sheet of paper. print A and B on one side, and C and D on the other side. fold in half.
very advanced meathod, many of my instructors used this back when i was in college
I once took a physics class that used clickers, and a big problem was with click collisions. By that I mean two clicks at the same time prevented the system for getting either. This is a serious problem in a lecture class, and only about 50% of the students ever got their answers through in any reasonable time. Maybe an open source clicker with bluetooth or some other protocol would be much better.
For those 100 or 200 level classes with 200+ people in them, one might argue that it would be beneficial to maintain order. But the reality of the situation is that you'd have to give out clickers to every student, then train the professors how to use them. And seriously, folks, most professors aren't going to give a damn about learning to use these, especially those older ones with tenure who were born before Christ walked the earth. So they're most likely going to ignore them anyway. The other disadvantage is that these things would break down, and probably frequently. Students themselves wouldn't know how they work (properly, being the key word here). When they think they know how it works, the darn thing will break, and have to get fixed. IT departments are just going to love these things! LOL
This may or may not be helpful, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
In the mid-90s there was a system which could allow movie theatre audiences to "vote" for different choices on a movie appearing on screen, sort of like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, but as a big-screen movie instead. From what I recall, the idea wasn't too popular, with only one movie actually released (called "Mr. Payback") but perhaps the technology behind it could be used as the basis for open-source clickers. I don't actually know if the devices themselves were wireless or not.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
You could use USB for the interface back to a piece of host software on a regular computer. There are lots of cheap microcontrollers with USB interfaces built in, and they even come with reference firmware and drivers. USB is an incredibly easy bus from a hardware circuit perspective too.
Combine that with pcb123.com and a couple hundred dollars for boards and parts, and you've got your clickers. The only hard part will be finding some kind of plastic case to put them in that will be durable enough for classroom use. You can save money by not soldering the USB connector onto all the boards.
Sheesh. Somebody with a chip that big on his shoulder is unlikely to have anything useful to say.
Gee, taking attendance at class; horrible, eh? Sick when teachers think they should do that.
Re: the hw/exam system, how about commenting on the actual problems and questions that you answer? Are they good or bad? Do they do a decent job of testing whether you've learned the material and do they help you learn the material? That would seem to be more important than how much work your professors have to do grading classes with hundreds of people in them.
Finally, gee, somebody wants to use something you don't want to use, and they should get bent, eh? Thanks for the contribution.
don't exist. at least, my experience with cps pads has been dismal at best... or was that because they were used in chemistry class ? :P
The only way to make something like this affordable would be to design the clickers yourself and get them mass produced. You can probably build a bulk 1000+ clickers @ 20 dollars or less each. Starting with a "smart remote" will be way too expensive. If you really cared, then pool a few investors and get some outsourced electronics company to build your clickers (preferably with a design you submit to them. I wouldn't trust some guy I don't know to mess up my idea). You could even set a unique id on a memory chip in the manufactured remote.
There is no cheap and easy way to do it.
It sounds like you want a universal remote.
This site has a schematic for a universal remote that you can build yourself.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
We only used them once or twice in a couple classes when I was an undergrad. Are they really used that often?
Raise your hand?
I have used multi-color 3"x5" cards as "clickers" for years to teach classes. Have a set in with one in each of four colors (red, green, blue, yellow) and give each student a set. You can ask multiple choice, true & false, matching, ect.. questions and have the entire class respond by holding up the card with the color that signifies the answer they think is right. No computers, low cost, and very effective. Clickers are a case of too much technology for too little learning, IMHO.
They often need to do projects for their senior projects. That might be one in which someone is interested.
cellphones!
most cellphones have java support these days and most college students have cellphones.
The easiest way to do it is to just not go wireless in the first place. Once you get rid of this criteria, wiring a lecture hall with the cable for a connection really isn't that difficult.
/., these guys actually did the experimentation, are intellectually capable of rolling their own project had they desired, and made a decision based on their experiences. They're very nice people and will probably share their experiences with you, particularly prof. Mats Selen, who afaik headed the project.
The subjects in which clickers are mainly used (physics, engineering), everyone already has a graphical calculator, and they're generally of either HP or TI variety. Thus you only have two (ok maybe 3, TI-85 line is quite different from 83's), but then you have no mandatory extra cost to the student, since everyone in these disciplines has a suitable calculator already.
No hardware issues, no support issues, you basically just wire a minijack to every seat, and you're set.
I know the physics program at uiuc has experimented with this about 5 years ago, prior to them becoming the new fad. You probably want to check with their physics education group http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/research/per/
about the plus/minuses with it. IIRC they eventaully went with commercial clickers -- I'm pretty sure there's a good reason why, you probably should check with them.
Unlike the majority of these posts that you're going to read from
Raise your hand; you'll get noticed quicker. You also don't require batteries to run it.
People don't like to feel stupid, especially in front of their peers. If a professor is trying to find out if her students know something and asks for hands, you get three different groups
Clickers let the professor get high response rate with anonymity. There's a lot of hate on /. for these things, but used properly (and I've seen it done many times) they're a great tool
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
1. Professors won't go for it. Cell phones are already enough of a problem in the classroom. The last thing most professors want to do is encourage people to bring them to class and more importantly, if they must be brought to class, they'd rather not have students leaving them on (as a college student who has had a lecture course of 300 students interrupted on multiple occassions by one or two idiots who leaves their phone with who-knows-what ringtone on, believe me, I know).
2. Students won't go for it. Contrary to popular belief, not all students have or want cell phones. I don't own one and plan on avoiding owning one as long as possible (hopefully until whoever I work for buys me one and pays for it). I'd rather not have to pay yet more money to go to school just so I can answer quizes - books cost enough, thank you very much.
The problem with a unique ID for the clicker is that you could later identify who had which clicker, meaning that the answers would not truly be anonymous.
Instead, I would have a button on the clicker with a label like "begin session" which would cause the device to generate a UUID for the session.
Alternatively you may want to take each measure independently in which case you can create the UUID for each button press.
It is preferred that you have a MAC address to create a UUID, but you don' t necessarily have to have one. Some classes of UUIDs do not require a MAC. Alternatively, the device could retrieve a UUID via a transaction when it is activated.
If I were doing this, I would probably write a version of the app for Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, WinCE, and Symbian.
On the more capable devices, you could make such a clicker pretty sophisticated. For example, it could show the text of the question and whether you have already answered it or not.
I would probably have a Mac/Windows/Linux PC application recording the data for each question. I'd probably set it up to be fed into SPSS or whatever.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
802.11b chipsets are already pretty cheap, and in many cases schools already have network infastructure instealled. If you can do an 802.11b scanner for $50, why not a wireless "clicker"?
At my university, we use H-ITT "clickers". They are the crappiest pieces of crap that I have ever used.
nothin
What kind of half assed college uses a clicker? The purpose of college is to teach, not train monkeys.
Gen Chem at Penn State tried these things a short while ago. They didn't work worth a damn and the students were bitter about having to shell out ten bucks each for a system that didn't work. (That's on top of the thousands the college shelled out on their end of the system.) I'm thinking hardwired with a mag stripe reader would have worked much better. Swipe of the student ID and attendence is taken (remember multiple clickers could be carried around by one student but students aren't quick to give up their key to their dorm room.) No trying to aim for the reciever you don't think everyone else is trying to aim at. Wireless is a neat toy but hard wired is really the way things should have gone.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
On behalf of all the talented people of slashdot, I recommend implementing a grammar-check function into those new-fangled clickers. :-)
Also, you might consider stopping all human maladies. Here's how you do it:
Do you know anything about psychology or physiology? If you're good at one, get somebody who's good with the other to help you out. And make sure you cure ALL people (Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc..).
What could be simpler?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I don't understand why more faculty don't do this type of "real world" project. I get so tired of the 2,000 plus year old style of teaching where the instructor is the fount of all knowledge spouting it in the front of a group of students.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
I'm a full-time student, a freshmen, and I'm amazed (and annoyed) at the number of my peers who sit dumbly when the discussion requires a response. Isn't it preferable that the educational experience encourage the growth of balls/ovaries, rather than allowing timidity to flourish?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Instead of making the students pay $45 (like they do here at my university) why not go with something simple? How did they do this a decade ago? They passed out scantron sheets (the fill in the bubble, machine read sheets). If used correctly they are just as effective for use as class attendance and a lot less expensive.
My Company - Red Cedar Technology
I saw a demonstration of such a system. It had a screen at the front of the class room. The screen had the question and the multiple choices. Below the choices were the numbers assigned to each clicker (student.) When you made your selection, your number on the screen blinked verifying it had recorded your answer. If you changed your answer, it would blink again.
So during the demo, I point out that if I worked out a code, I could message each other students the answers via these blinks. Say, three blinks means select "c".
The teachers swore me to secrecy. I only reveal it now as a warning to others....
It's proven technology, and your professor will feel important and respected when you give your answer.
sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
Perhaps we need to get in touch with the "Who want's to be a Millionaire" Folks. They seem to have clickers that work. Otherwise, why not a web based system? Sorta like those 'webpolls' you see intagrated to every forum system/cms, thats based on a simple PHP/MySQL style thing, used to record and display the data.
I'm not very interested in whether an open source solution can be built, of course it can.
My question is, "Why do we need such a device?"
It would be a much simpler solution to not interrupt the class for some nearly anonymous touchy-feely "feel-good" feedback from the class, when the professor can just ask the class to raise hands, or ask for questions, etc.
After all, learning is not instantaneous, so instantaneous feedback on whether the class "just" go a point amounts to no more than asking if there are any questions. After all, just after the class "clicks" that they don't understand, the professor will STILL have to ask the class questions to find out why the don't understand, or how they mis-understand.
Plus, who is to stop the person clicking what they guy to the left of them clicked?
Here at UC Berkeley most students hate these clickers (called 'PRS' here, for personal response system or some shit like that). It is so superficial. A professor throws on some multiple choice question, and people hit a button to answer it and get participation credit. Is this the second grade or something? What the hell is participation credit for - in colleges we don't need that kind of bullshit. If people don't want to pay attention to lectures, that is their choice - most of the time lectures are useless anyways. Not only that, it wastes $45 on each student's part.
The best solution is to not have any such system and simply DO example problems in lecture. The thing that college lectures lack is not something captivating (like hitting the button on a remote is actually captivating...) or innovative, but BETTER LECTURES. Period. Lecturers tend to go over things in too much of an 'overview' format (at least in the science/tech classes) and avoid doing actual example problems that might help us LEARN.
Instead of throwing materials and problems at students and saying 'Here go study and come take my test later', lecturers should try to teach the students legitimately and AIM to improving their testing performance...right now, all it feels like is that I am paying 20k a year for taking a few tests. A f***ing remote control won't solve this issue of boring, shitty lectures.
Who says you don't want to identify who clicked it? I used one of these last year, and we did it for marks. Kinda hard if it doesn't identify who's who.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Wireless is the feasible way to go. Wires would be tripped over and yanked at. The only boon to wired is that you can run power to them and not worry about batteries. Although .... my company develops low power portable devices and they claim 20 year lifetime.
RFID with read/write capabilities. In a few years, every student will have implants anyways. Seriously though. RFID.
~adjusts tin foil hat
All in favor say "I' all opposed "Nay" or place a special camera in front of the the room. Give the students sticks with diodes on one or both ends. The camera scans the room and counts the number of correct/incorrect answers. Neurosurgeons use a similar technology to track their instruments during surgery.
I think the best solution would be to buy a few remotes from your local RadioShack (As many buttons as you need). Remove the key labels, and create your own (i.e. 1-4, corresponding to a shown answer set). You can either figure out how to identify each clicker with the programming codes for TVs, or create your own system. I think a two-digit signal would be sufficient: the clicker ID and the selection. I don't know much about this subject, nor much about what your scenario will be, so this is my best guess.
and that would be pretty simple to implement and code, would be to use clickers with serial connections. RS232 or the like. All the clickers would plug into a networked serial hub device (such as a RocketPort or DeviceMaster) , each clicker would be on it's own virtual serial port on the server or instuctor's computer. The "unique" ID part is covered by the serial port ID. Reading from a serial port buffer is simple to code for. I do it all the time for Windows apps. Setup a control array of serial ports in your app. A single "OnComm" event is triggered when a port recieves data, and the index is passed in which tells the code what serial port (and hence what clicker) sent the data. It wouldn't take but a few minutes of playing with a clicker to know exactly what data each button on it sends when pressed.
The problem with a unique ID for the clicker is that you could later identify who had which clicker
That's not the problem, it's the point.
At my local university, they use these for 2 reasons. 1 - to take attendance and give a partial grade for it. 2 - to give quick quizzes at the end of a lecture.
Sort of hard to assign grades to students without a unique ID.
My understanding is that students buy these at the campus bookstore, then register them online as to identify themselves. They then bring them to classes and such.
Worst part of what I heard is that they cost about $15 and you have to return them at the end of the course!
..mork
The point is not to test whether you are paying attention, the point is to get you to pay more attention and to learn more. Folks seem to learn more when they are thinking and solving problems, rather than simply allowing the lecture to wash over them. The clickers are a tool to get people thinking about and applying (or maybe even just regurgitating) what they just heard -- it's a memory aid.
I have lectured at CU in several courses with over 200 students, and it's remarkable how difficult preparing such lectures can be. The problem is that the professor must pitch the discussion at a level where all but the worst students are not lost, and even the brightest students get something. Even among students with about the same level of understanding, different people learn in different ways.
Doing example problems is (of course) very important -- but the point of the clicker is to get you, the student, to think about the example problem as it is happening. Otherwise a large fraction of the class simply gets lost -- doesn't assimilate the material.
Now, one might argue that "getting lost" in lecture is a sign that one shouldn't be there in the first place -- but that is a discussion for pundits and university administrators. The job of the lecturer is to get the material planted in the minds of as many of the students as possible. The best ones will pick it up anyway, and the worst ones are hopeless -- so the name of the game is to help the mediocre students as much as possible.
Of course, upper-division courses are different. I am speaking of large (introductory) lecture courses.
Alright.
First, a normal infrared remote won't work. You'll need a custom programmed microcontroller remote and a receiver to handle such. In order for the receiver to detect all the remote's answers (given a one way system) each remote, when the button is pressed, would send its message, pause a random amount of time, send again, pause random again, etc. This would go on for a second or so during and after the button press so the receiver has a chance to catch it in the midst of all the other remotes sending their data. The data burst would have to be *very* short to increase the bandwidth and decrease the collision rate.
A one-way RF system would be very similar.
If you do a two way radio, there are a few more options. Ideally you'd do a two-way network (such as zigbee) since it would be very expandable - it could accept a variety of clickers from the simple credit card remote to the full keyboard and display.
A simple 2.4GHz custom network could be designed using Nordic Semiconductor's nrf series of chips. The nRF24E1 chip would be perfect - includes microcontroller, 2.4GHz transceiver, and is very low power.
-Adam
How about a old keyboard (lots of keys), youll need lots of wire extensions
A $5-10 old mice (only 2-3 buttons) Froogle
A ancient joystick (up=A, right=B, down=C, left=D) Froogle
Instead of making a bunch of wires cross the floor you could also have a row go into a wireless transmitter of some kind.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
IIR my student days through a beer drenched fog, at least 20% of students would purposefully answer wrongly just for a lark, eg. answer "yes I'm gay" when in fact they're straight - or would be if they were getting any.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I am thinking the use of fire, radiation, lasers, UV, X-Rays, knives, spears, blow guns, etc.
Come to think of it, Tasers have unique identifying dots that are emitted whenever fired.
Something to get the kiddies interested.
Learning should be fun!
Just my thoughts!
We had something like this back in elementary school. It was called a slate. You wrote on it with a piece of chalk and when the teacher told you time was up everyone held up their slate with the answer written on them. The technology is cheap, requires no training or special software and it allows for a wider range of answers than some multiple-choice clicker.
I realized after posting, OP was looking for a wireless solution. Oh well.
This could work as a partially wired system, however. The clickers are wired to the serial hubs, but make the serial hubs on 802.11 connections.
These things will pass. Look at developing a better technology.
What would an open-source solution offer over the commercially available ones that would possibly make any one want to switch?
Don't say cost, because these are not costing the nuiversities a penny - the students bare the cost buy buying/leasing/renting the clickers.
You say you think this is a prime opportunity for open-srouce. I say good luck.
I work in product development, particularly electronics. A student showed me his clicker and described it to me. Nothing fancy - probably the same ones you've seen. They are a custom job though.. don't believe the company managed to source some strange 6 button IR remotes each that broadcast a unique ID. Send one to a chinese manufacturer and he'll send you a crate of them back in few weeks.
You must also realize that this is about marketing. I bet some of these companies pay the universities for using their clickers - a profit sharing arrangement. You think the powers-that-be are surfing sourceforge looking for alternatives? Not in this life-time.
Technically, IR seems wrong for these in my opinion, but obviously keeps costs down.
I don't think these will last. The idea is a little silly and having students pay for them just makes them upset - in fact, the guy who showed me his said he was trying to avoid the classes which used these things because he didn't want to buy one (never mind the principals that some might have against even using one).
My suggestion to you would be to come up with a better idea - forget the clickers. Perhaps by the time your idea is mature enough clickers will be on their way out.
..mork
I think you are getting a little ahead of yourself. If you haven't taken a product design class, now would be a good time.
You really need to spend some time figuring out what your requirements are (do you want a variable number of answers, or a set amount? Does there need to be any immediate feedback? Do you need a keyboard or will pushbutton input be acceptable?).
Define high-level requirements and then brainstorm for each one. Don't get caught up in wired or wireless, 802.11 or bluetooth, that's a medium and can be easily changed later.
Make sure for every requirement (and you should have a good number of requirements) that you have multiple ways of addressing that requirement. Write down every idea, don't judge them yet. Make sure you have some wacky ideas that just might work given some more time.
Get a focus group together of the "customer." This means students, teaching faculty, administrators, IT (they'll probably have to support).
Find out what their requirements and their desires are.
Get some people to help, multiple EEs/CSEs for the hardware side, some CompSci's to help with the software, even some psychology majors to help you with what works and doesn't for human factors.
Put together an initial prototype. It can be crude and rely on external addressing, wires, whatever, even if you plan to implement security and wireless later, you need a proof of concept.
Go step by step, so you have a rough interface done, work on the addressing scheme. Build another prototype (by the way, use an FPGA or something else that you can re-use without buying new, or at least put everything on protoboards).
Play around with different wired and wireless connections. Try getting an 802.11, bluetooth, wired, etc. connection working, and have users try them out.
Once you have an idea of what you want to build, do it. Design a PCB and have some made (some meaning enough to do a reasonable test, at least 25). Look for somebody to do injection molding for a plastic case, put everything together. This is your prototype.
Test, test, test.
Go back to the drawing board, what worked, what didn't. Redesign, get input from users, brainstorm again.
Build a second set of prototypes (maybe you can reuse some or all of the components if you are lucky).
Run more tests, this time on a larger scale. Ask a professor to use them in a class.
Take input from these tests and build yet a third prototype. By this time, get a MechE or materials person involved. These things will be in backpacks, under textbooks, sat on, dropped, will they withstand some abuse? Do some environmental testing (it doesn't have to be official, though, look at some of the things a place like Retlif laboratories (http://www.retlif.com/ can do, and at least mimic some of the tests.
You now have a Beta product. Have a few classes use it for a semester and get feedback. Repeat the necessary steps for the Alpha product. At this point, try to sell it as a system and get a wider group of users.
This process is not quick, not easy, not cheap. But if you want to create a serious product, it's the way to go.
As a design engineer, I know how big of a pain in the butt going through each step can be, but if you skip a step to save a week, it will cost you two weeks later on, when you don't have that time to spend.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
Today I rode my horseless carriage to the general store. I traded some venison for a brand new 'clicker'. Now that wireless is obsolete, I need something to control all my new-fangled devices.
Maybe it is just a generation gap thing. Old people call remote controls clickers, because they used to click. That was a long time ago, folks. Why are we adopting an archaic usage of this word?
At my school, we use the CPS RF clickers. The device itself is only around $15. The school pays for the license to use it, so I have no idea how much that is. All the teacher does is plug a receiver into his USB port and start up the software. It has an anonymous mode that doesn't log who responded what. In a class of about 200-300 students, 180 of us had clickers and things moved pretty well. The range was def good enough and the only real bottleneck was when the software had to generate a graph of responses.
I think that St Francis Xavier physics http://www.stfx.ca/ was looking at a WiFi system that was pretty inexpensive, and I remember UIUC physics doing some investigation of building their own.
Seems like such a narrow use device that could be completely subsumed by using webbrowsers (driven from either laptops or cellphones or Wifi PDAs). Everyone in school these days (even highschool) has at least a laptop, cellphone or PDA. And schools are often forcing the purchase of a laptop or similar.
So you mean a classroom poll like this?
Do you brush your teeth before sex in the morning ?
() Yes
() No
() I don't have sex.
() I don't have teeth.
() I don't awake up til the afternoon
I know it has been a while since I was in a classroom, but the last time I was a student it was a part of the learning process to get destroyed by a prof in front of everyone at least once. It's nothing compared to what a CIO or other exec can and will do to you on a daily basis.
When did students become such wussys?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
10 Easy steps:
;-))
.org domain name, and share the whole works with the rest of the world. Some just might be grateful.
/. about the wonderful working result (but please don't show up again to tell us the idea was good but the implementation wasn't possible because...).
0) Evaluate your location: cabling issues are easier to incorporate in old-style sloped auditoriums than in "flat" spaces (unless there is a crawling space underneath).
1) Use a network-strategy (either a UTP cabling system with small keypad devices containing a micro-system with a NIC or use one of the proven wireless systems).
2) a) Degign the hardware using the LCP-concept (Lowest Cost Possible). Enough cheap hardware with correct networking capabilities (even wireless) can be found nowadays.
b) Ask around to see whether the device (i.e. keypad design) can be improved with small but basic functionalities that no one thought about before. Such as basic yes/no/maybe buttons (almost all PRS-systems seem to lack them). Or a "cancel previous answer-accept new answer instead for my ID" button.
c) google around to see if you can find a very very environmentfriendly and cheap powersource. Combine with 2) a).
3) In case of a cabled solution: use routers and hubs who can stand the traffic. In case of a wireless solution: don't forget the bandwith-bottleneck problems (enough receivers).
4) Design your software so that: each clicker/keypad can only give 1 and 1 answer only to each given question. Use OSS db's which can handle data quickly. Postprocessing (data-analysis) can be done later, once all data has been collected. Use an OSS language to postprocess all the data (that way you are a) platform independent and b) you can easily blame evil companies for being to slow
5) Find an OSS-friendly university to field-test, debug and patch the whole concept.
6) License it as GPL (or lGPL or any OSS-friendly licence concept) so that it will remain available at low cost to any & all educational institute (and no company may try to incorporate it into their capitalistic expansion schemes). Education should be available at the lowest cost possible. Right?
7) Choose a nice
8) Make sure you have lots of free time to pull this off, or know people who are willing to spend their time.
9) Tell
Have fun!
Peace & Long Life,
MadMan-2
All kinds of IR remote control overview information here
oems
At Kent State University serveral rooms have been outfited with IR units for the clickers. They dont work well. The manufacturers reported to my instructors that fluorescent lights messup the signal from the clickers. Also the range of the clickers dont allow for large lecture halls of 250 people. While the tracking software was able to hold 250 students "profiles" the performance in the classroom was slow. I hear there are programs that would allow for PDAs with 802.11b to function as clickers but i dont know any students that are going to buy a $150 PDA for a intro business class (my clicker was for an intro business class of about 250 people). the system we used is called CPS and is at http://www.einstruction.com As for the software you would need to have some sort of database to create "profiles for each student..their name, clicker ID, and scores/data entered. You would need to be able to have a display to show if the clicker input was captured.
[Click] [Click] [Click]
[Click]!
??
The question you have to ask is whether you actually want to use the data you'd gather from the clickers and how you want to use it. My statics class just switched from clickers back to a colored flash card system because the professor wanted a system to get responses from all the students in the class so he could get a feeling for students' understanding. The teacher projects a problem with multiple choice answers coded by color and can gage student response immediately without the technical hassle or cost.
Yawn.
Honestly, I challenge anyone to come up with a legitimate educational application for this piece of idiocy that doesn't have a simpler and more effective solution.
I can't get over this kind of nonsense actually showing up in classrooms. Sounds like someone needs a venue to sell $2 remote controls for a 1000% markup, and is falling back on the oldie-but-goodie "think of the children".
why don't we figure out a way to break the system? a jammer, or some clicker mutant that causes a buffer overflow somewhere in the software...=P just an engineering applications tangent...has nothing to do with the fact that i'm lookin for a cool wireless project for one of my senior classes...
DIY links for building your own system
I'm not sure why it needs to be "clickers" - in a large classroom environment, I'm assuming auditorium style fixed seating, which suggests that keypad for each seat would be the best solution. There are readily available keypad solutions (i.e. crestron) which would support 250+ keypads on a single bus, all individually addressed, and would be far less maintenance intensive than any wireless solution. From 2 to 12 buttons could be done "off the shelf". And no replacement cost for "clickers" walking out the door every class period.
And, if you still needed some # of wireless devices, they could be easily tied into the same system.
http://www.crestron.com/
http://www.humaneinterface.com/
-a.e.mossberg
unless you're distance learning and use it to change the channel. ;P
Ah, but wouldn't it be great if you could switch lecturers with the click of a button. "Sorry RMS I'm just not understanding your point, why don't we try a little Knuth instead?"
to
Instead of teaching our children the wrong example of genocide, go down in dignity and teach them how to do it properly...
My 6th grade teacher broke me of this. After catching me being the only one to raise my hand on a yes or no question, and then quickly put it down, he called me out. He made me put my hand back up. He then made a big deal about how I thought I knew better than every single person in the class. He really rubbed it in.
Then he did the work, and...I was the only one that got the answer right. I don't know if it made the impact on everyone else that it did on me, but it was definitly one of those defining moments. Of course, ever since, I have had to deal with people thinking I am arrogent if I don't just go along with the herd.
Here's a similar homebrew system for the Apple II:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/1542/
Of course, this could also be used as a mass weapon against a professor who insists on lecturing until the very last minute of class, and _then_ giving out the assignment for next class.
"Good afternoon, class. Today we will be voting with laser pointers. As I am not fond of blindness, I will be delivering today's lecture with my eyes closed."
*fwmp*
"Okay. Which one of you pulled down my pants?"
-- This void intentionally left null.
My biggest problem with these Clickers is the pricing model. I don't know of any other companies, but as for the eInstruction CPS model, this is how it works here at MSU. They charge a reasonable price for the student's units (I believe it was under $20 for me)
However, in order to use this 'clicker' in your class, you had to go to eInstruction's website and pay them $15 per semester in order to use it. True, one can also purchase a "lifetime membership" or such to eliminate such registration fees, but class schedules aren't fixed, and most classes don't use them, but some do... you don't know if the unlimited usage price is cheaper or not when the time comes to make the decision.
Why charge the fee? They manage a website where instructors can log on and download a listing of the ids for all the students in their respective classes, something that could be easily implemented with a couple of PHP (or ASP) scripts and a SQL server.
The student owns the clickers, and the university owns the receivers. Yet, the vendors treat the units as cash cows and utilize proprietary interfaces to require students to register through a common website so they can collect their extra fees.
As a current college student, one of my larger lectures (roughly 200 people) uses "clickers" from http://www.h-itt.com/ to answer quizzes, and to poll the class. It is rather limited, as we discuss current issues and ethics. I'm sure that the use of clickers would be far more trouble than it is worth for a serious academic class, such as any type of math.
Pretty much every phone has blue tooth OR an IR POrt. Just get a receiver.
So, what do the talented people of Slashdot recommend?
We're not sure. We haven't found them yet.
Why not just develop some cross-platform client software as the "clicker" and transmit the answers over an 802.11g network. You get a good range, good compatibility, and many more options. This could even be used to answer open-ended questions with students simply typing their responses and clicking 'send'.
I know you mean this as a joke, but I thought I'd point out that a professor of mine once built a setup like this (okay, it had nothing to do with clickers) in a circular room on our campus. Basically he made a giant set of Helmholtz coils, big enough to enclose the whole room.
.... but I just thought I'd relate the story. Assuming you can get some surplus 25 or 50-conductor POTS cable, making a room-sized Helmholtz coil arrangement isn't at all impossible.
What he did was take the circumference of the room, and multiply it by 2, and then go out and got two lengths of 50-pair phone cables that long. One he mounted on a raceway on the wall, the other at about floor level. Where the cable ends met, he spliced the conductors of the phone wires together so that instead of 50 pairs, he made one long continuous circuit, running around the circumference of the room 200 times (50 pairs = 100 conductors * 2 wraps = 200 times around).
One loop was at floor level, the other was somewhere in the walls near the ceiling. The internal resistance of the coils was pretty high, but with an AC current it produced a measurable current in another coil any place in the room.
The purpose of the whole thing was actually a sort of assisted listening system for people with hearing aids. Many hearing aids have a small coil in them attached to the amplifier which can act as a sort of receiving antenna if the person is standing in a fluctuating EM field at audio frequencies. So basically you could hook these coils up to an audio source (with proper amplification) and a person with a hearing aid would be able to hear it through their own hearing aid, standing or sitting anywhere in the room.
Whether or not the system was ever used for anything other than lab demonstrations I don't know
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Hi, I'm the submitter of this story. If anyone wants to help, I've set up a SourceForge project here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/acaclick
I go to a small tech school where the Physics department is using the engineering students (of which I am a part of) as the guinea pigs on testing a system that could work similarly. Instead of providing a physical clicker to everyone, the department chose to use the student laptops, which everyone has to buy when they begin school, and a piece of software called TurningPoint vPad (2006 version). The idea of the program is a good one: you can take graded or ungraded quizzes, and if you'd like you can even ask anonymous questions of the professor (yes, this gets abused quite a bit, so maybe it shouldn't be anonymous to the professor). Additionally, rather than using a wired connection the school takes advantage of an existing 802.11g network to connect. Although it sounds like a great idea, the actual execution is very poor. The software sends the question data with a user ID attatched, so anyone with a packet sniffer can see who sends what to the professor, and sends the user ID in cleartext. Also, the software is very poor at keeping it's connection, with a timeout of about 1 second, which isn't very well suited for a wireless network. Finally, the infrastructure of the building and its wireless networks makes connecting to servers harder than it needs to. So far this program is only used in one lecture hall, and depending on where you're sitting in that lecture hall you can receive anywhere from 1 to 3 wireless networks. Maybe a new or open-source program would help alleviate some of these issues (particularly the timeout issue). However, try to get some of the professors involved in the program, maybe even suggest it to a professor (in writing, with a date on it, so no greedy professors can take the credit for your idea) who works in your school's Computer Science department (if it has one).
freeflux-powered open-source blog
Well, whatever you do, don't use IR for the transport, =).
Here's some software http://midnightresearch.com/projects/surveysays called surveysays to intercept all the answers (in your range) and highlight the most common given answer. It even calls a trigger so that you can send your answer (or all your friends answers, =) based on this. Check it out here: http://midnightresearch.com/projects/surveysays
I know I'm coming in late in the thread, but Reply Systems keypads are where it's at. The problem is that they only sell to dealers, and to be a dealer, it appears that you have to be able to sell software for them. I wrote up a review of the major available software systems recently. We bought a 300 keypad system. It would be great to see open source, cross-platform software to run these puppies. Getting Fleetwood (Reply Systems' owner) to let people buy the hardware for use with open source software might be tricky though.
I actually have worked on something like this for the company I work for. We wanted to use remotes to control LED signs, and were tired of the RF remotes, bought off the shelf, we were using because of their short rage. Instead we develped our own remotes using the ZigBee protocol. The chips that we used were the XBee chips from Maxstream, along with a pic chip. The range on these are amazing, getting 4000+ feet using the pro module. It is a small enough chip you could fit on a small PCB board and fit in a small remote unit. As for the addressing, when programming the pic chips on the remotes, use the chip burning software to serialize each of the chips. you could then access this data and send it in a packet along w/ the button u pressed. This could all be sent to a "master" box that has an xbee module and decode all of the data.
how much would you charge for these clickers because I feel that the $30 is bull$hit. not to mention I've had to buy now three different ones because of the university changing policy 3 of the 5 semesters I've been here. I hope something universal like you have in mind gets adopted because we sure as hell need it.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
No need to splice individual wires: just press insulation-displacement connectors onto the ends of the ribbon cable at an offset of one wire and connect them together. Cut the two outermost wires with a sharp knife and attach them to the signal source.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Why make it so hard? Give each clicker a unique ID, store them in a box, let each student take one at the beginning of the class and return them at the end. No way to know who had which clicker and secondly you can keep an eye on those clickers and prevent them from disappearing.
The ID is necessary, how are you otherwise going to prevent a student from voting multiple times (intended or not)? Normal RCs toggle a particlar bit in the code they send each time the button is pressed. This way a receiver can know if you pressed the button again or are still holding the button down. But a receiver can't distinguish between differend RCs.
If the ID is noted on the clicker in a human-readable format, the ID can be matched with a student at the beginning of the lecture if the teacher intents to hold a test.
This way provides more options than generating random IDs and posses less problems as well (how to make sure the IDs are unique and anonymous?).
IMO it's possible to do even with a standard IR-DA port. A classic IR-DA port supports up to 4Mb/s or 500KB/s. Let each clicker send out its byte at this rate, then wait a relative long time and resend. Timing can be random. With a bit experimentation such a system can run reliable.
well, maybe instead of using wireless clickers, you could just build them into the students' chairs; this would work really well to prevent theft of such devices, and you wouldn't have to worry about range issues.
as you can probably tell, i'm not a huge fan of wireless. however if you went with a wired version that would eliminate many of the associated headaches.
Owtch. Just imagine.
I'm sure my subject line sounds like I'm chiding you, but exactly the opposite.
You should complain to anyone and everyone at the University if you feel your teachers are doing a bad job.
You should remind anyone and everyone that has anything to do with tuition payments at your University that you are the customer paying for a service, and if that service is not rendered, you will demand a refund.
I did this when I was in school and they had to let me quit the class and give me a free one the next quarter.
These Ask Slashdot posts really bug the crap out of me. It's nice that people are getting together and brainstorming on ideas but I think this forum is abused. I hate reading how such and such IT manager that doesn't know jack about his job and is lazy to do research or too cheap to hire a consultant asks a question about how things should be done or how is it typically done by the community. I wonder how many of these posts have resulted in such and such claiming that it was their idea that revolutionized whatever they did at whatever company they work for and taking all the credit. There are legitimate forums for this type of discussion. I have so many friends who are true experts in questions that have been posted here who are unemployed or working at crap jobs completely unrelated to their field because these jack-offs keep sucking the industry. This ought to stir some S*@! up.
Sorry, but the point of education isn't to socialize you. It's to teach.
I think these devices are great. I used them in classes in highschool. They greatly improve the efficiency of a classroom environment. They can enable all students to learn, via a distributed Socratic method, as though each had a personal tutor. This type of teaching is unparalleled in efficiency and efficacy. Schools in the near future will have to use them to maintain standards and keep down costs.
Let me give you a personal example. For the year that I attended college, I had a Calculus class. For the most part, the object of this class was to have us memorize as many different estimation methods as possible. I think it was called Calc II. There were around 40 students.
Every class period consisted of the same general routine. The professor would have us turn to a new chapter in our 50 lb book. He would begin to explain whatever new concept he hoped to teach in that hour long class. After about three minutes of explanation, a girl at the back of the class would raise her hand and ask some inane question, usually pertaining to whatever was taught in the last class period. Being the nice helpful teacher that he was, the professor would then spend anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes explaining some concept that most of the class understood to this particular student, almost completely ignoring the day's lesson. At most, the professor usually got about half of each lesson completed before the class was over.
In effect, this one (poor) student got a half hour worth of private tutoring out of each class period. The other 39 students in the class got to figure out the lesson for themselves on their own time, before the next class period, and attempt the homework from their own self-teachings.
Had the professor used some of these devices, or at least a little common sense, he would have been able to judge the rate at which each student was understanding his lessons. Those who didn't keep up could be tutored separately, outside of class. Instead of charging ahead into new, more complex concepts, he could have spent more time on the things he was doing a poor job of explaining. Instead, the class snowballed into a giant clusterfuck of confusion and waste for all involved.
This was an expensive, small private school, yet, apparently, was run by idiots, and happily catered to idiot students.
I was on full academic scholarship as a National Merit Finalist yet, needless to say, I flunked right out. And I have no intention of going back. Tuition rates have doubled. The school is still run by (and filled with) the same idiots. I can seriously get a better education for free, on the damn internet, than I can wasting my time there.
I went to college for an education, not for a social experience, not for psychological evaluation, and not to waste my time. And while, technically, I failed college, in reality college failed me. College failed to provide me with an environment in which I could learn. By the rising tuition rates all over the country, most colleges are failing just as badly as mine was. I didn't need to pay more to have psychologists tell me what I was doing wrong. I needed a professor that would teach instead of waste my time.
So, in conclusion, why don't you just take your ridiculous preconceived notions, and your "let them have psychologists" attitude, and cram them up your ass.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I much rather say "Sorry RMS I understand your point but you are Wrong!" This is why clickers and more anonomious methods of comunicating with professors is important. A lot of them are either intimidating to students (Some times on porpose, and some times not (I had one Professor whos presence just made everyone feel afraid of him while he was actually a very nice and thoughful guy who was open to your responces.)).
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Nicely over complicated! you must be a Business management major.
make all clickers 100% identical, simply including the ibutton 3 legged transistor looking serial number chip in the parts count will make each unit have a nice huge unique serial number. coupled with a nice dirt cheap 442mhz transmitter module and your button push simply transmits your serial number and a single byte multiple times the PC on the recieving end (better yet, 4 reciever modules spaced around the room evenly) will sort out the responses and the duplicates. duplicates will be required because of using the same frequency and transmitters transmitting over top of each other.
I can build the clicker hardware in about 5 minutes writing a pic program for it will take longer. writing the instructor pc software a bit linger still.
this is a very non difficult project, no two clickers will ever have the same ID and if you use a fast/short databurst the chance that you will miss a response of a room of 100 clickers all hittting their buttons at the same time is very minimal. if your transmission takes 5ms and you havea random delay between transmits of 9-100ms and repeat transmission for 10 times. you will get counted.
we did this stuff in EE back in the late 80's I was able to pick out 20 different data transmitters all on the same bench using the same frequency.
any undergrad in EE and CS can do this project in less than a weekend.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm sorry I can't help the poster of the main article; it's out of my league.
I've seen numerous posts about how clickers are stupid. I personally couldn't wait to take a class with the clickers. Now I'm in one, and the class loves them. Of course, it's a geeky class (Data Structures and Algorithms II), but that doesn't change anything. We keep bugging the professor to get to the clicker questions, and when she does we have a field day.
While there are hiccups, the system for the most part works. Sometimes people can't get it to connect, sometimes it lags quite a bit, but in the end it works.
As for a waste of money, the clickers we use only cost $15, and the University pays the subscription fee to use them -- once we buy them and enroll in a UAkron class, we can use the clicker in any class at any school for the rest of its useful life. I think $15 is a good investment in such a useful tool.
First get some Old Laptops for the class, this could be easy because a lot of people who are graduating are going to upgrade their computer so they get rid of their laptops that are 4 or more years old. Take out the unessary items like CD-Roms, Harddrives, and anything else but the very basics. If the laptop has a Wi-Fi card that is supported by Linux then cool, else install one. Then rewire a USB port to go the hard drive area and put a memory stick with a Light Linux Distribution that can preboot and quickly and make it support Wi-Fi (The hard part becuase Linux Sucks on good wireless support, so does Microsoft, you should take some cues from Apple on this one), The Linux distribution should consist Kernel, X-Windows, and a Web Browser that is full screen. And goes to a web server that is on campus. All the programming for the questions are on the web which the professor can contol and the students just type the anser in on the keyboard. Getting Rid of extranious Moving Parts, and going solid state helps imporve life on the laptops, and improve battery life. And going with a Web Interface allows for updates to the Question Software without having to install stuff on every computer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The point of a clicker is not to be antisocial. We use them in very large halls with 100+ students. The professor wants to get a general concensus, so he puts a sample problem on the board (that may or may not require calculations). You as a student can either bullshit or actually do the problem, but either way it allows the professor to say "can someone who answered B tell me why?" while also allowing attendance. Its annoying, but it serves a good purpose.
sig: Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not
How about just a USB mouse? one of those with extra buttons.
-/elad
I'm currently part of a project at the University of Michigan that is developing an Open Source "clicker" environment. We've been testing the system for about a year now. This semester, three large classes (150+) will be using it. The system uses wireless, iPaqs and in-house developed software. The project has funding from HP and the University of Michigan. Aside from the technical support, the team also has a psychologist to observe the affect on the students. Once our testing is done, most of the project will be made available to other Universities under some sort of common license. Those details are still being hashed out, but we do plan on making this available to others. Of particular note is that this environment is actually a lot more than just yes/no, on/off clicking. There are interactive flash graphics and a lot of features that make it truly engaging.
This company make handsets which meet all the criteria including each having unique ids.
http://www.gtcocalcomp.com/interwriteprs.htm
My univeristy used them during lectures as part of a research project. It allowed the lecturer to do real time polls as part of his powerpoint presentation to judge if people understood the material. There was a window that popped up and showed the id of every one who voted as well as the current total of voters. They ended up limiting the number of times you could vote because people were repeatedly voting and spamming the system to see how many times they could get their id on the screen.
You can vote 1-9 and rate your vote as neutral, high confidence or low confidence.
I'm not sure how expensive they are though.
Of course, the answer, if you happen to go to one of thoses schools where everyone has a laptop, is to make a simple tcp app that can send out questions to students, and have the students answer it. It wouldn't take much of a computer to handle 500 incoming requests, which would be about the maximum size of most classes. I'm sure wireless internet would work well. They could even make it a web page, so that the students wouldn't have to install any weird software, or have any specific OS. The questions could be sent to a powerful server, and the server could send the results to the professors computer. I'm sure there are a lot of privacy issues with this, but I think that was a problem with the old system anyway.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So every response in class becomes an answer to a multiple-choice question so you can select 1 of n possible answers?
Yuk.... Sounds like a real killer to creative thinking and good learning environments to me.
Bluetooth chips should be pretty cheap by now. Why not make a clicker that establishes an ad-hoc mesh, with those closest to the podium (highest tranceived RF strength to the base unit) occupying the first level of the mesh, then each of those identifying strongest neighbors whom they wish to transact with, and so on. Mesh set-up should complete in a few seconds at most. Then each click hops P2P down the auditorium from assigned parent to grandparent until it reaches the front. This has the advantages of low power requirement and potentially huge scalability, though the bandwidth of the first-level transceivers would be the ultimate bottleneck. The other drawback is that the weird kid, the one who smells funny and always sits away from everyone else, wouldn't be in range of the mesh.
Presentations were given, and occasionally polls were taken by the speaker. Like "Are we on target with this new product?" and a PowerPoint slide of a target flashes on the screen. Aim for the bullseye if you think we're on target. Or "Tell us what you are hearing from your customers".... and 5 choices appeared on the screen, like "Our products aren't price competitive" or "We're hard to do business with" (if I recall correctly).
This concept actually worked VERY well. The funniest moment came when they showed a picture of Scott McNealy, and the whole audience quickly reached for their lasers. Poor Scott's face turned bright red!
9 volt battery, a button, a lightbulb, and four pieces of wire.
your hand might work just as well.
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
This is most likely not a technological problem but a legal one.
Most likely the company making the clickers has a patent that prevents anyone else from making them and competing with better products.
- Brian
Go find the engineering department and get a grad student or a good undergrad EE and one in ME to design and build a clicker for you. Should be fairly cheap. Now the receiver is what is going to be interesting. It has to receive probably hundreds of signals in a very short time. Overall this would make a great senior project. Realistically solvable but still rather complex.
I do security
... so I can't really see why people are recommending bluetooth, 802.11, etc. I'm convinced that you guys are all computer science graduates, not engineers that develop real products ;)
What this guy needs is a simple system - a 1-way RF transmitter with a couple of buttons on it. Just like a garage door opener, a keyless remote for a car, etc. Remember that these things are dirt simple, have excellent range, are individually serialized, and are extremely cheap to make.
You could probably build the remotes yourself - you're basically talking something like an rfPIC from Microchip with a couple of buttons on it. I think Philips, Cypress, etc. also make similar solutions... But you could probably buy a box of 500 car remotes from China for less than the price of making 10 of your own remotes.
For the price, you probably won't even care if students occasionally walk off with the remotes. Or heck, you might even be able to let them - eg. give a student their own remote for a semester, which reduces the "which RF transmitter ID matches which student" problem to a once-a-semester thing. A student could possibly also use a single remote for multiple classes.
Then it's a matter of finding a receiver. You can probably buy an evaluation kit from the car remote manufacturer, which includes a few remotes and a receiver which plugs into a computer. Then it's all software from that point on.
I'd do a bit of searching in this area. Hope this helps.
Keep It Simple you freakin paranoid Spaz. We're not talking about government secrets, just enough anonymity to make students comfortable enough to answer truthfully.
I always used my mouth to deliver the answer (wireless) in spoken language. Worked perfectly, and, much better than even an open source solution, absolutely no hard- or software is needed for it.
Kosi
The easy way to build this is out of a PIC microcontroller. They cost about $2, and you can easily reprogram them in circuit. PICs are very easy to learn, and work well for this sort of thing.
....
Also, you have to use RF for the transmission. You can buy some RF transmitter modules for about $10 which are very easy to use.
The problem is how to avoid interference. Why not interrogate each device in turn. I.e.
Everyone press a button; is stored in devices.
Server To Device1: What is your code?
Device1: my code is XXX-YYY (XXX = serial no; YYY= answer)
Or wait 1 second for timeout
Server to Device2:
Or, if everyone has a wifi laptop, then you can make what you want very easily.
Don't worry about too many wires, though. There are lots of 1-wire or 2-wire communications chips which can be strung along the same wire and still communicate individually.
A wired lecture hall would also eliminate the problems of lost clickers and false clickers. Wireless systems would be vulnerable to all sorts of false inputs.
In my previous life i worked with some of these. Unfortunately i don't recall the name of the company that made the gear (i think they were out of wisconsin, something-TRAC), but the interface was a std serial port. the clickers were RF and sent their data to a reciever which then hooked up to a PC via the serial port. at the time, the only s/w provided by the h/w manufacturer was MSDOS based, so my job was to make it work in Windows (Windows For workgroups at the time). They (my company) wanted to use Macromedia Authorware as the presentation platform, so i wrote a DDE shim of sorts which polled the base unit via the serial port for the data, and made the results availble to Authorware.
later, i modified this to a client/server architecture, so the clickers could be in one classroom with the students, and the professor in another, for distance learning programs. This is where the system really worked, as the visual/verbal cues many teachers can use in a class to gauge the class general understanding are missing in a distance learning environment.
I would imagine most modern hardware systems prob still use a serial port (if it isn't broke, dont fix it), or MAYBE USB. i'd be willing to bet serial though. In a niche market like this advancement is rather slow.
What about universal TV remotes? You can get a mini one for about $12.
make a cartridge for a game boy color
GBC is widely available used for $15ea (i bought 3 at this price)
specs:
color screen, reflective non-backlit
IR bidirectional communications (good range)
Dpad + 4 buttons
sterio sound, mono speaker
2x AA batteries
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Unfortunately, that single disadvantage is a pretty big one. Laser pointers may not have enough advantage over a simple show of hands to overcome this difficulty, certainly not with younger students.
I think the most someone should have to do is clench their butt cheeks. You realize that clicking takes my hands off the home keys and this leads to possible typos. very inefficient.
I thought I'd throw my experience in the hat. In my OAC Biology class (that'd be like "grade 13") my professor happened to make a big deal of it every time someone gave a correct, and good answer in a way that made you feel good about responding. He showed me that you have nothing to fear from your classmates. They may be upset you're answering a question, they make look at you with disdain, but they're really jealous they didn't know the answer. So instead of taking advantage of a moment to build on their knowledge, they'd rather pout and tease you for knowing something.
I think these clickers are asinine. Anonymity? Grow up, and stand up. You can't hide forever. Group rates of understanding the material? Nothing a show of hands won't do. Teacher catering to the slower learners? Teacher should encourage the student to meet after class. We don't need a damn remote to fix the problem, we just need a little maturity.
Correct use of clickers involves presenting students with a chalenging conceptual situation and then giving them time to think and talk about it. This "peer instruction" time gives students a chance to verbalise their understanding with each other and keeps them activily involved in the material. After discussion the students answer with the clickers, and class results are displayed on the screen. The professor and students imidiatly know wether the class understands the concept, and the studnets have fun learning.
I give extra credit when 100% of the class gets the question correct.
Testing has proven that students retain more from this style of class than from pure lecture.
I was not able to locate an original Nokia vibrating battery for my 5190 two years ago...
n g+battery
:)
:(
Not a problem now. http://www.google.com/search?q=nokia+5190+vibrati
Sounds like you are using tracfone. Three of my extended family does. My immediate family, though, are using t-mobile togo prepaid.
With ToGo, once you've added 1000 minutes of airtime (retail $100 but airtime value is $400-$500 depending on 'home' area) then the maintenance cost of the phone is supposedly only $10 per year. (A $10 card keeps the phone active for one year and adds 50 minutes.) http://www.t-mobile.com/prepaid/rates.asp And free incoming text messages make it a GREAT pager.
T-mobile does not have as good a coverage as tracfone though.
sdb
See http://www.h-itt.com/
Clickers $25 each, single base station $200.
Have not yet taken a look at anything but their advertising.
It's a two way IR remote with 13 buttons. And a LED to confirm the base received the response.
Any technology or teaching method can be and often is implemented badly by bad teachers.
Clickers can be anonymous with respect to the other students, but in most if not all systems provide the teacher with detailed information about each students performance.
If the teacher has a large bank of questions that are associated with each element of the curriculum. The teacher can ask lots of questions during the day. At the end of the day, without the burden of grading papers, the teacher can review statistical reports that indicate whether any elements of the curricululm were skipped. Are there topics that everyone is having difficult with? Are there topics that everyone gets? How is each student doing? How should I organize small groups tommorow?
Doesn't mean the teacher will review these reports and adapt the next days teaching based on todays results. If not the clicker is useless. If so the students can benefit greatly.
That said, though, this isn't an easy problem to solve, at least if you want to be able to give individuals credit rather than just getting feedback, because the whole point is that that inherently can't be anonymous, and inherently involves implementing a mechanism that can handle 2-300 simultaneous uniquely identifiable signals. That's not a trivial problem, even given expensive hardware.
One question I have is: does this system *really* need to have instant feedback? If not, it would be a heck of lot easier for the student's boxes to just record the answers and then spit them out when passed over/through an RFID-style reader on the way out of the classroom (RFID chips are really cheap, and readers are readily available which is a benefit). They probably should be time coded to avoid synchronization problems without having to have 2-way communications during the class.
If instant feedback is required, certainly I can't imagine that unique identifiers would be needed for the instant feedback itself, so you could combine a system like the above with a simple amplitude system. Each box could put out a pulse of known length on one of N different frequencies or codes at a reasonably known power (the antennae would have to be uniformly enough distributed to receive similar power from most locations in the room), and the received power on that frequency could be integrated simply by running the (demodulated?) signal through an FFT and some accumulators.
What exactly are people learning by answering yes/no and multiple choice type questions? Isn't there more to be gained by open and frank discussion? Maybe students who feel embarrassed should take some self-help courses in how to be socially interactive.
Go to the EE dept and any first year student could probably design and build a prototype system in a couple fo weeks! Get a prof to declare it a class project for the good of the school. At the end of the project, take the best design and mass produce it. Probably cost anywhere from 1/2 to 1/5 the cost of the current system.
This could probably even be done easily in a high school setting. Recently a casual EE guy at work made a set of these for use with his kids home schooling group. Took like 3 days to make!
You are living and "working" in the very environment that would know how to do this best, take advantage of it!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Colleges and Universities implement these devices to reduce paperwork and speed the interactivity of class. The days of school marms calling on Jane and Johnny to answer simple questions over reading, etcl, are gone, ESPECIALLY in large lecture halls. This semester is the first time I've used a "clicker" and it took the prof 3 weeks to get the receivers installed for intra-deptartmental red-tape. My school, Informatics, doesn't have enough room, and has to hold lectures in places like the Chem building, but it took forever for the Chem dept. to approve our installation of receievers... but I digress. The point of this guy's request for help wasn't so you crotchety jerks could whine about how you had to "raise your hand and actually answer the question" or had to be "social." It's not about social skills, our lectures are divided into as many as 4-5 small labs for students to discuss the material outside of lecture. Personally, I tried to find an open source "clicker" software to load into my Clie (which has an IR port) and wasn't able to find anything useful. I applaud this student's effort, and will be contacting him in hopes that I can help in some way.
Gimme rodents to beat your ass with.
Every TGI Fridays around here has those Trvia Game clickers for people who want to sit at the bar and play trivia and drink beer. Darn things seem to work pretty good, reliable and they can't be that expensive since they usually have dozens of them. They have a charging station for them at the back of the bar and it takes about 10 seconds to grab one and register with the system.
I can't imagine it would be too hard to adapt these for the purpose. You might start by tracking down the OEM for those little boxes.
All the social stuff aside and looking at it from a purely academic point of view, it sounds like a distributed recieving stations or repeaters are your best answer. I don't think opensource would allow for any higher quality of performance than what you were willing to put into it. I know that the repeaters exists for every frequency from TV remotes to 802.11G. The clicker technology doesn't have to change and a repeater station should have a much wider range. That way the system is modular and can be moved with relative ease, especially if they could be equiped with a batery supply that was charged at the end of the day. I realize that that means you are asking people to interface with more than just the user ends though.
Ooh ooh ooh! *bouncing in seat* I know this one!
This just occured to me: Simply give each student a set of several RFID tags and an Altoids tin. When they figure out how they want to respond, they leave the appropriate tag on the desk while putting the others inside the tin.
After a moment's countdown, an RFID reader scans the room and tallies up all the tags it saw. Simple, cheap, and ought to raise awareness of the privacy implications and countermeasures!
Do you remember any more details who was developing it? And how far they got?
I think I was at an AAPT event where Mats Selens from UIUC said something about building their own and maybe setting up a company to produce them, but I do not recall in detail who and maybe it wasn't UIUC, but that sticks with me. Adam Sarty at Saint Mary's University in Halifax (not SFX as previously stated) gave these two systems as references in a CAP Congress presentation last summer: Personal Response System http://www.educue.com/ Classroom Performance System http://www.einstruction.com/