One of the most familiar activities for students, in classrooms around the world, is answering questions. Teachers use the feedback to gauge how their students are progressing and the benefits of practicing (both knowledge recall and application) are well known. Popular pedagogies such as peer instruction (traditionally involving students answering questions using devices known as "clickers") form the basis of a large body of educational research, and numerous educational "polling" tools have been developed to enhance both engagement and convenience (e.g. GoSoapBox, PeerWise Live, Kahoot, and many others). This is a large space, with Kahoot reporting 50 million monthly active users and companies like TopHat generating tens of millions in annual revenue.
This project will look to enhance the typical polling experience in two ways. Firstly, by employing novel techniques from popular recreational quizzing apps such as HQ, which uses a daily appointment mechanic and knock-out style tournament. Secondly, by offering a wider variety of question types, including numerical, free-text and interactive image-based questions.
Undergraduate
The outcomes of this project are:
1. A hosted polling application, including both instructor and student interfaces
2. Research appropriate technologies to build a scalable, low latency, platform
3. Research a range of question formats that could reasonably be supported
3. Evaluate the tool from both a usability and student experience perspective
Mobile oriented web-development
Lab allocations have not been finalised