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."

Comments

Re:Missing the point, really.

[rknop]

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.

Where clickers are most useful are in large lecture classes. When you have 100+ students out in the audience, you simply don't have the time to tailyr education to individuals without giving short shrift to a lot of other individuals. It's also frequently very difficult to understand just where the students as a whole are. Clickers, when well used, can help with all of that.

The fact remains, though, that some teachers won't like them. Some, however, do... but would love it if there were an open-source solution, so that we weren't stuck with using the software and such provided.

Re:Missing the point, really.

[MushMouth]

I thought the point of the clicker were to override the need for todays students to "fit within the norm". thus when a student has a problem that student can make it known to the teacher without making it know to everyone in the class or even identifying himself for a potential scorn. I think there is an essay about this in "Freakanomics" but then again it could be another pop econ book that I read.

You do not need a hard coded ID for the clicker.

[soft_guy]

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.

Re:Missing the point, really.

[vidarh]

Thats great and all when you can do it in small groups, and for longer range planning. But my experience with classes - both as a student when I was a kid and teaching a few courses a few years ago - is that during a lecture you'll have little guidance on whether you're moving too fast or too slow. If you ask questions, there'll always be students that's hanging behind that do their best to conceal it because they don't want to seem stupid, and students that are ahead and just get bored and disinterested.

You'll also not have much of a chance of genuinely assessing how the group of students as a whole are handling the material.

I was the kind of student who'd never ever ask questions, who'd never volunteer answers, and who'd in general just try my best to get the teacher to ignore me because I usually found classes boring.

In a setting like that, having the chance of asking quick control questions that everyone can answer and seeing the results from a whole class in seconds without putting anyone on the spot can be quite helpful... Instead of asking and getting answers from 3-4 people and not knowing whether they're an anomaly or not, you immediately know exactly how many got what you're going through and how many don't...

It helps you tailor your presentation at a much more granular level - being able to skip material everyone understands, or repeat material lots of students have problems with.

With proper use, at the end of it you may end up having more time to spend on interacting with the individual students.

And, as an extra benefit, you'll already have a pretty good record of what they have problems with, that could replace a lot of quizes etc.

I can certainly see teacher abusing them, but I wouldn't discount them so quickly.

Uncorroborated Anecdote...

[benjamindees]

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.