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.
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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.