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Ask Slashdot: Setting Up Wireless Voting For Students?
RabidRabbit23 writes "I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students. We need a quick and low cost way to record votes done by the students in large committees. There will be two or three committees with about 200 students in each. We need to be able to record yes, no or abstention votes and must be able to identify each student's vote. We looked into radio response clickers, but it is very expensive to buy 400-600 of them. They cost about $40 at university bookstores, which is way out of our budget, but we don't know what kind of discount we could get by buying directly from the manufacturer. We do have wireless internet but we do not have enough bandwidth to support everyone using a laptop. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for a better way to record the students' votes?"
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A Model UN Club meeting is in progress at Springfield elementary.
SKINNER
Ok, delegates, you leave tomorrow for the statewide Model U.N., so this is out last chance to bone up. And bone we will!
All of the kids break into laughter, except Lisa.
BART
(to Lisa) Lighten up, Lis.
SKINNER
(to Martin) Finland, let's see that naitve dance.
Martin starts dancing Lappish style.
SKINNER
Smile more. Work that pelvis. No, too much smile. Sit down. (to Milhouse) Poland! Tell us about your nation's achievements!
MILHOUSE
Well, uh, I heard they sent a rocket to the sun once... at night... And there was that submarine, with the screen doors...
SKINNER
No, no, no, no, no, young man, you need to do some SERIOUS boning!
This time only Lisa laughs.
BART
Oh, grow up, Lis.
SKINNER
(to Bart) OK, Libya... exports!
BART
Yes, sir, you American pig!
SKINNER
(chuckles) Nice touch.
BART
Uh, ahem, let's see...
Bart shuffles his blank papers, pretending to find something.
BART
The exports of Libya are numerous in amount. One thing they export is corn, or as the Indians call it, "maize". Another famous Indian was "Crazy Horse". In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrast. Thank you.
A commotion interrupts Skinner before he can comment on Bart's performance. Nelson, the Japanese delegate, pinches Wendell's nose with chopsticks.
WENDELL
Oww, I can't breath! Please stop him!
SKINNER
I'd like to, but I'm afraid he has diplomatic immunity.
LISA
Point of order, if we want to learn anything we must respec--
BART
Point of odor, Lisa stinks.
All the kids laugh.
SHERRI
(to Bart) Hey. Leave her alone!
NELSON
(to Sherri) You leave her alone!
All the kids start fighting with each other, with one exception. Ralph, the Canadian delegate, stands.
RALPH
(singing) Oh, Canada!
Skinner bangs his shoe on the table.
SKINNER
Order, order! Do you kids wanna be like the real U.N., or do you just wanna squabble and waste time?
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Make the students buy their votes. Soon after you should have enough money to by the clicker thingies.
You want cheap and you want to be able to identify each vote with a specific person?
Certainly doing something with computers is going to be expensive in some way. It is also going to take a long time because not everyone would have their own computer.
I'd suggest colored pieces of paper that are preprinted with a number. Red for no, green for yes, blue for abstention. Something simple like that. The pieces of paper could also be tagged for "Question 1", "Question 2", etc. Counting them wouldn't be that hard and they would be traceable - names could be written on the slips but even without that you would have the preprinted numbers. This would fall apart for blind students but would work for multiple languages.
Sure, you could have some fancy system but it is going to cost money. Potentially lots of money. Anything that would require queuing up would likely get unmanageable quickly with 200 students.
They could just use paper ballots like everyone else... You can count 200 ballots in a matter of minutes instead of training students on an electronic system that may or may not be flaky.
You can set up an ODK form (http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/), kids vote with their smartphone (or computer), and all the results go into a Google Fusion Table (http://www.google.com/fusiontables).
Why use any commercial solution at all? You're in a school after all. Make your students create simple buttons on your electrics class. You can just transfer the clicks via wire. Then make your programming class code the back-end system for a computer. Microsoft offers Visual Studio Express to students for free and you can easily get a cheap license to your school by calling Microsoft's sales team. At the same time your students will get real world experience and get to know the best programming tools used in the industry.
Come on, you're a Microsoft sales rep., aren't you?
Did you not even make it past the first sentence? "I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students" means they don't work for a high school, not that most any high schools would have an "electrics" class anyways, or that your suggestion made any sense at all.
The counting portion of the problem is by far the easiest.
There's a free setup you can use that does just that: SMS Poll
Then make your programming class code the back-end system for a computer.
Letting the programming class count all the votes might be just as good as letting the programming class cast all the votes.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
Same idea, different pricing plan:
Poll Everywhere
Polls for up to 30 votes are free, after that you've gotta pay.
For about $65 you can get an SMS voting site; vote via SMS, Web, twitter... can limit to one vote per person and record (by phone #) who votes. Requires attendees to have SMS services... and for the 3 or 4 votes might cost some of them $1 or so for the SMS message. Easy, cheap, real-time reporting on web page or flash control.
We used : http://www.polleverywhere.com/ but there are lots of competitors with similar service.
Yeah; you don't really need a lot of wireless bandwidth for a dinky little yes/no vote. Your users aren't doing anything serious like streaming video. You don't need to let them onto the Internet at large. So 54 Mbps can go a long way. You just need a couple of real enterprise-grade APs that won't fall over when they have more than ten people connected to them. If instantaneous bandwidth really is still an issue, perhaps you can write a JavaScript web UI that introduces random delays (0-N seconds) before submitting?
Also, have you considered supplementing the wifi with Ethernet cables? It would help blunt the load somewhat. You can get basic 10/100 switches pretty cheap.
I would recommend a particular vendor's APs, since they're kinda designed for denser deployments, but I work for them, so I'll abstain from mentioning them by name here.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
lol Hey man, at least use the same account to reply :P
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
As someone who's used in-class polling systems quite a bit (I'm a college professor), there are only two solutions that will work. A dedicated "clicker" system (I recommend the ones by Turning Point), or a non-technical solution. Paper ballots are obvious; the guy who suggested labeled poker chips had a good idea too.
If you try to muck around with laptops and cell phones and polling websites and custom software and/or hardware, you're going to spend your whole time doing tech support rather than model UN'ing.
Pick between low-tech or high-cost. If you try to go high-tech and low-cost, you will also get "doesn't work".
No you don't. You want. I did Model UN in High School-- at some of the larger conferences too. We survived without electronic voting. Focus on the politics. If you have money (or time to search for a free one) to throw away hire a professional diplomat to come in and give a talk. I *still* remember and occasionally talk about such speeches that I heard in High School. That will be far far more valuable to your students than an electronic voting solution that is likely to break at some point, waste a lot of time while you're trying to fix it, then force you to go with paper anyway.
Even more if you are looking at a small number of votes... Why don't you go buy a couple blocks of paper? It is absolutely more secure than any e-voting scheme (yes, even if it is not for a big countrywide thingy). No need to set up an e-voting solution - unless you just want to impress the kids with shiny kewl toyz.
if I had mod points.
Teaching people to vote by computer is a bad thing, IMO.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
you can take a look at Election Buddy - it would probably do what you are asking for. http://electionbuddy.com/
I'm not sure what you mean by 'not enough bandwidth', but 200 web pages isn't that much.