Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Raise your hand?
Ya, i like where this is going. Set up your clicker to listen to the other clickers around you, then answer with the majority, or the same as the really smart guy you know, or some weighted mix thereof.
But really, even ignoring all that stuff, it seems like a bad idea for any kind of testing anyway, too easy to cheat off your neighbor just by looking.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
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.
What kind of half assed college uses a clicker? The purpose of college is to teach, not train monkeys.
The problem is, everyone may use a different one. You mentioned three different calculators, but I personally use either an 89 or a laptop. These days, people just get software for their laptop as opposed to a new calculator.
Still allows the other students to see what "the shy student" or "the embarrassed student" said.
Some students feel that being made a fool of in front of class is embarrassing enought that they would rather fail the class than be ridiculed.
Yes, it's stupid, but I bet you a full 1/2 of students feel that way.
Yes I go to school still at night, so this is not from 1984. And yes, I usually don't care who thinks what so I open my big mouth whenever, but others say nothing the entire semester, and are happy with a C.
I tell you it's bad because my current teacher asks: "Does anybody _not_ understand this concept?" and the class stays silent, looking confortable. Then the teacher asks: "Does anybody understand this concept?" and the room also stays silent and still, very unconfortable now. (he's doing a lousy job btw)
The key is that people try to make friends of other students, not professors, so student-to-student image is veeeery important.
I know I'm going off-topic, but I can tell you that this is the very reason educators need something like the clicker.
Ultimately, the teaching environment sucks. Teachers are too few and many are very bad, can't be understood because of poor english speaking skills, can't make the subject interesting, or simply don't care.
The younger students I see (and I do pity them) are adrift in a sea of bureaucracy that is absolutely sucking their creativity dry. They look like zombies, listening like drones for hours on end and just memorizing enough to pass the next test. Cumulative final? Have to remember this crap more than 4 weeks straight? Drop the class, or suffer through yet-another crappy class taught by someone who can't teach.
I know you want to know: CSUN.
"Piter, too, is dead."
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....
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.
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.
Very few of them have bluetooth capable phones though.
The clickers must have some way of managing contention, a backoff algorithm or polling of some sort, otherwise they'd just all collide if everyone clicked at the same time, and the results wouldn't be discernable.
So, it appears that all you'd need is to hotwire a single clicker into transmitting continuously, and it would inhibit all the others.
Of course, your idea of crashing the software is cute, but it just takes one software patch and you're back to the drawing board. Attacking the RF layer is more likely to yield a permanent solution.
Better yet, if one of the supposed advantages of a clicker system is anonymity, why not build a receiver that lets you eavesdrop on everyone else's clicks and serial numbers?
Pretty much every phone has blue tooth OR an IR POrt. Just get a receiver.
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.
...or at least a little common sense... hits the nail right on the head. The teacher should have instructed the student to come see him after class or during lunch. Clickers would not have solved this problem.
I don't see how a clicker would have prevented a student that didn't understand a concept from asking a question. Well...unless the schools say, "You aren't allowed to ask questions only to answer them with your clicker." But, what kind of education would that be? However your one minor point
I agree with the grandparent posting, part of school is to socialize students, get them interacting, have discussions in class and promote thinking. Allowing students to "click" through lessons does none of these.
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.