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

Missing the point, really.

[XoXus]

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.

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.

Re:Missing the point, really.

[XoXus]

That sounds like a social problem, one that I remember from high-school but not from university. Social problems tend to require social solutions, and if students fear "potential scorn", then there is a culture problem. These are rarely solved by technological means. And I do mean _solved_, rather than just hidden away.

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.

Lo-Tech Solution

[multipartmixed]

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.

Re:Lo-Tech Solution

[femto]

Is it really fair that a taller student's vote counts more than a shorter student's?

Here is a better idea:

Enclose the room in a giant coil. Ideally this coil will be of infinite length to get a uniform field, thus giving short students the same vote as taller students. Each student gets to keep their magnet.

At the count of three, each student either points the north pole of their magnet to the front of the room (for yes) or the rear of the room (for no).

The polarity of the current spike induced in the coil indicates the majority yes/no vote. The magnitude can be usd to inicate the strength of the yes/no.

Apart from being fair to short students, this method does better then needing no batteries. It generates power. The power generated can be sold to the electricity grid and the system will eventually pay for itself. Once it has paid for itself the system will return a profit to the university. Surely a good thing in this day and age when Universities are expected to return money from teaching and research?

Try these Cypress chips

[Savantissimo]

www.cypress.com
CY7C601xx
CY7C602xx
About $3-$5 in quantity
Development kit: CY3655 $350

(also check out their wireless USB products)
* Wireless enCoRe(TM) II -"enhanced Component
Reduction"
o Crystalless oscillator with support for an external crystal or resonator. The internal oscillator eliminates the need for an external crystal or resonator
o Configurable IO for real-world interface without external components
* Enhanced 8-bit microcontroller
o Harvard architecture
o M8C CPU speed can be up to 24 MHz or sourced by
an external crystal, resonator, or signal
* Internal memory
o 256 bytes of RAM
o Eight Kbytes of Flash including EEROM emulation
* Low power consumption
o Typically 10 mA at 6 MHz
o 10-A sleep
* In-system reprogrammability
o Allows easy firmware update
* General-purpose I/O ports
o Up to 36 General Purpose I/O (GPIO) pins
o High current drive on GPIO pins. Configurable 8- or 50-mA/pin current sink on designated pins
o Each GPIO port supports high-impedance inputs,
configurable pull-up, open drain output, CMOS/TTL
inputs, and CMOS output
o Maskable interrupts on all I/O pins
* SPI serial communication
o Master or slave operation
o Configurable up to 2-Mbit/second transfers
o Supports half duplex single data line mode for
optical sensors
* 2-channel 8-bit or 1-channel 16-bit capture timer. Capture timers registers store both rising and falling edge times
o Two registers each for two input pins
o Separate registers for rising and falling edge capture
o Simplifies interface to RF inputs for wireless
applications
o Internal low-power wake-up timer during suspend
mode
o Periodic wake-up with no external components
* Programm

ZigBee

[truesaer]

ZigBee would be a cool technology to use for this. It is a low speed adhoc wireless standard with a smallish range (but sufficient for classroom use). The problem is that there isn't much silicon available yet because it is a relatively new standard, but you should be able to find a few things out there.

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.

Re:Wireless?

[chris_mahan]

laser pointers, 4 large areas above the boards: A, B, C, D. A&D substitute for yes/no.

Have people point to the area they want. roughly count the dots.

Anonymous too: it's hard to tell in a room of 100 students where 1 in patricular is pointing to.

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.

Actually, this is a poor solution

[edremy]

IIAAT (I am an academic technologist) and hand-raising is almost worthless in a classroom. Why? Anonimity and response rates

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

1. The kid in the front row who knows everything, or at least thinks he does
2. The people who wait to see what #1 answers and then agree with him
3. The ones who won't raise their hands in any case for fear of being called an idiot.

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

Re:Actually, this is a poor solution

[rknop]

Clickers are a solution looking for a problem.

In fact, research has shown that using clickers to help enable "Peer Instruction" techniques can greatly improve the quality and durability of learning.

Hopefully, some empirical evidence outweighs what you think ought to be true.

Re:Actually, this is a poor solution

[Dr. Zowie]

Well, the last time I chimed in with experience from lecturing, I was modded down "flamebait" -- but I'll come back for more. The clickers (in my experience) really help the middle third of the class -- the people who aren't coming back as majors, and therefore will only learn whatever they glean from this particular class: it is the last time they will encounter this material formally.

The future majors will probably do just fine anyway -- it's the history majors in astronomy class, or the engineers in art history class, who need help. The clickers have been shown to help those students focus and assimilate material.

Uh, no.

[ChePibe]

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.

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.

No one likes clickers

[vectorian798]

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.

Re:the problem with clickers

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Close. The real reality of the situation is that you sell clickers to every student (making a tidy profit), and then the professors don't use them because they don't know how.

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.