Improving Classroom Dynamics: Click’N’Gage,a Mobile Audience Response System

Ivo NeskovicCity College

∗

3, Leontos Sofou StreetThessaloniki, Greece

ivo.neskovic@gmail.com

Dragan BisercicCity College

3, Leontos Sofou StreetThessaloniki, Greece

dbisercic@city.academic.gr

Mitko ZafirovskiCity College

3, Leontos Sofou StreetThessaloniki, Greece

mitkozaf@yahoo.com

ABSTRACTThe problem in communication between students and lec-turers in large classrooms has increased substantially in lastcouple of years because many students do not participatein classroom discussions. To engage students into dynamicclassroom participation, universities often encourage stu-dents to use audience response systems (ARS). By increasingthe interactivity between lecturer and students, the dynamicstudent participation improves and the learning outcome isexpected to rise.

The progress in the mobile technologies has influenced newapproaches in developing ARS. In this paper, we discuss theneed for mobile ARS and we propose a new architecture fordeveloping those systems. Furthermore, we present detailsfrom our reference implementation of the proposed architec-ture, named Click’N’Gage, together with some of the crucialdesign decisions we took while developing the system. Thepaper closes with a short evaluation of the system, togetherwith few ideas on how the system could be improved in thefuture.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsD.2.11 [Software Engineering]: Software Architectures—domain-specific architectures; H.4 [Information SystemsApplications]: Miscellaneous; J.1 [Computer Applica-tions]: Administrative Data Processing—education; K.3.1[Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Edu-cation—computer-assisted instruction; K.3.2 [Computersand Education]: Computer and Information Science Edu-cation—self-assessment, curriculum

General TermsDesign, Performance, Human Factors

∗City College is an International Faculty of the Universityof Sheffield.

KeywordsAudience response systems, classroom dynamics, connectedlimited device configuration, clickers, Java micro edition 2,Java enterprise edition 6, mobile devices, student engage-ment, sun Java wireless toolkit

1. INTRODUCTIONWith the increasing number of students in the classrooms,the classroom teaching is becoming more and more a oneway communication between lecturers and students. Theproblem with the large classrooms is that the lecturers arenot able to engage in a discussion with every student. How-ever, even when given chance, many students do not want toget into discussion because they might be too shy, too tired,or simply unconcerned with the topic discussed [11]. Suchone way communication approach to teaching can lead tomany undesirable consequences. For example, the lecturerin the classroom might not be able to always notice whatthe students have understood in the lecture and what theyhave not understood. So, it might happen that the lectureris moving too quickly over a difficult concept. The result isstudents loosing interest in the subject matter. Therefore,the communication in the classroom should be a two waycommunication between lecturers and students as often aspossible.

In order to enhance the classroom teaching and communi-cation, many automated systems have been developed. Thegoal of such automated systems is to get student responsesas quickly and as cheaply as possible [5]. Also, the studentsare willing to participate more in classroom interaction whenthey can do it anonymously. Therefore, by letting all stu-dents answer questions in class anonymously, the lecturerscan get more attention from students and improve the class-room learning.

In improving the classroom dynamics [7], we have found themain motivation for developing our system, Click’N’Gage.The inspiration of this paper is to present our solution tothe problem explained above. The remainder of this paperis organized as follows: section 2 describes the audience re-sponse systems in general, section 3 discusses the advantagesand disadvantages of some of the similar systems, section 4gives additional information on mobile clickers, section 5talks about the Click’N’Gage in detail, section 6 providesthe evaluation of our system, and finally section 7 providesthe conclusion and possible future extensions of the system.

2. AUDIENCE RESPONSE SYSTEMSAn audience response system (ARS) is a system that canhelp lecturers initiate the two way communication with theirstudents. The basic idea of such system can be explained inthree simple steps. Firstly, the lecturers introduce to stu-dents a question with the list of possible answers. Secondly,the students choose the answer that they consider to be cor-rect. Finally, the answers are collected and the statisticalresults in the form of graphs are displayed to students.

The most well known ARS systems used in education areclickers [15]. Clickers consist of three different parts. Thefirst part consists of the hand-held devices (clickers) thatare used by the students to communicate information tothe system. Furthermore, the receiver is a device that getsthe information from the clickers. Finally, the third part isa software application that stores, processes, and displaysstudent responses.

The clickers look similar to the TV remote control units[15]. They can be hardwired to the receiver or they cansend data to the receiver wirelessly (infrared or radio fre-quency). Such clickers have been used in Universities sincelate 1990s. They enhance learning in class. Namely, by us-ing instant feedback, the lecturers are able to identify anyconcepts being misunderstood [13]. Also, they are fun touse since the lecturer can start a new, interesting, and dif-ficult topic by starting the anonymous discussion betweenstudents. However, clickers are not free. Considering thefact that students need to pay tuition fees and textbooks,the clickers can be too expensive for students if required forlectures. Also, it can be too expensive for the University toprovide clickers for all students. In addition to this, if click-ers are hardwired to the receiver, it might even be difficultto set up the system for very large classrooms.

The rapid development in mobile technologies has made pos-sible for developers to build cheaper ARS systems by usingcellular phones as the new development environment [12].The rationale for developing ARS systems on mobile phoneslies in the fact that most, if not all, students nowadays ownthem [11, 8]. Modern mobile phones take all the advantagesof the new technologies. Therefore, these phones have be-come more powerful than clickers. Not only that, mobilephones also do not require any installation process and theydo not distract students in classrooms while taking notesdue to their small size [8]. The phones capable of runningJava applications using SMS, Bluetooth, or WiFi can signifi-cantly reduce the overall cost of the ARS system [3, 4]. Suchmobile applications are fun and easy to use. However, thepossible drawback is that students might consume too muchtime doing other things with the mobile phones instead ofparticipating in class [12].

3. SIMILAR SYSTEMSMany systems that use mobile phones or similar handhelddevices have been developed in recent years to improve theclassroom interaction in educational institutions. In thissection, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of some ofthese systems.

One of the first ARS systems, developed in the early 1990sby Better Education Inc., is known today as ClassTalk [6].

ClassTalk used scientific calculators with data ports con-nected to a basic network via wire [11]. It was a great sys-tem for the time. However, nowadays such a system is notconsidered appropriate due to high cost of the hardware andmany possible problems that can arise when trying to set upthe system in the very large classrooms. Anyway, ClassTalkprovides very simple functionality to its users. For exam-ple, the lecturer prompts the question on the projector andthe students answer the question via scientific calculators.When all the answers are collected by the system, the systemshows the graphs displaying the statistical results of studentresponses. These graphs tell the lecturer how much materialhas been understood by the students.

One of the first systems that used wireless communicationbetween clickers and the system was EduCue’s PRS. Thissystem was developed at Hong Kong University of Scienceand Technology by Nelson Cue and C. K. Lee [11]. EduCueused a keypad and infrared technology for sending signals. Ithas become popular at many Universities. However, infraredtechnology is today rarely used since it has been overcomeby other modern wireless technologies.

Another interesting system that has been developed andused is TXT-2-LRN. The system lets the students answerthe questions via their cellular phones using built in SMStechnology. The only assumption that the developers madewas that most of the students actually own at least one cellphone [12]. The system uses a sophisticated SMS filteringtool on the server side. This approach leads to great avail-ability of the system, which is easy to use since most of thestudents use SMS messaging facilities daily. The problemwith this solutions, however, is the high cost of the SMSmessages. It is a big burden for students when they needto pay from their own pockets for the use of the system.A survey has shown that almost 65% of the students usingTXT-2-LRN spend monthly around 35$ for SMS, approxi-mately sending 2 to 3 messages per day [12]. But, even withthe high cost, 90% of the students had positive opinion ofthe system overall and they were happy to use it.

Furthermore, one of the most advanced ARS systems todayis VotApedia. This system is web based and gives its usersfew alternative options when voting. Namely, the users havethe option to register with VotApedia web site and vote on-line. Also, VotApedia has a specific algorithm that crates aspecific phone number for each answer from the given ques-tion. The voters can call this phone number and answer thequestion or simply send SMS message with the answer tothe same phone number [2]. Given these options, VotApe-dia can be very dynamic in terms of effectiveness, cost, andcomplexity. Each of the voters can use anyone of the givenservices. VotApedia seems to be a perfect system at thefirst glance, however, few flaws can be found when trying toapply the system in the classroom. The Web based votingoption, where students need to log in and find the questioncreated by the lecturer, can take a lot of time, which, unfor-tunately, is a time that a class can not afford to lose. Theother option, which is calling a number in order to vote, canbe easy for the students, but it disrupts the class when 200students make a call at the same time. The SMS seems asa more discrete option than the previous two, however, theproblems with SMS have already been explained above.

While evaluating the above systems, a few drawbacks havebecome apparent. The most notable disadvantage is the costof either setting up or using these systems. For example, inmost cases, the students are required to pay not only for thetuition and books at the universities but also for the accom-modation and food. Enforcing students to spend additionalresources for extra devices or services, which are needed onlyto improve the classroom participation, is considered as abad idea. In addition to this, not all universities can pro-vide such devices or services for all of their students due tohigh cost. However, the cost is not the only drawback. Thelecturers need to put additional effort to design questionsbefore class. Therefore, some lecturers might consider thebenefits of using ARS negligible and continue lecturing inthe traditional way.

4. MOBILE CLICKERS AS AN AUDIENCERESPONSE SYSTEM

As we showcased in the previous section, mobile phones havebeen already an integral part of many of the most popularaudience response systems, albeit utilizing only the ShortMessage Service. Therefore, these systems generated highcosts for its end users, the students, which ranged to 35$per month, a very high cost for the average student [12]. Inspite of the high cost, most of the students were very happyusing their mobile device in the classroom [12, 15]. Thispaper proposes a new architecture for developing audienceresponse systems utilizing mobile devices as their main com-ponent. The proposed architecture addresses the problemsraised in previous AR systems, introducing further improve-ments in the process.

The abstract architecture of the mobile clickers ARS (Figure1) provides an overview of the proposed methodology:

1. Students use their Internet powered mobile devices toanswer questions [5]

2. Answers are sent over the Internet to the core applica-tion system (server)

3. Data is analyzed and statistical charts are generated

4. Results are observed by the lecturer

Using this architecture, answers are no longer sent via SMSand it introduces the concept of an answers storage place,which in turn provides the ability to extract statistical dataused by lecturers for self-improvement. Additionally, ourarchitecture allows for implementing extra Quality of Service(QoS) [9] features into the system. We have identified fivekey features that every ARS should provide:

Anonymity: The system does not use any student personaldata. Anonymity and trust are two very important is-sues that students have [1, 14, 6]. The reviewed ARsystems use the students telephone number for identi-fication, which creates discomfort for them. The pro-posed architecture does not use any data which can beused to track back an answer to a specific student.

Connectivity: Due to the high cost of SMS messages, theproposed architecture utilizes the Internet. It is im-portant to mention that the system will require onlyan active Internet connection, not needing the detailsof how that connection is being established, whetherit is through WAP, WiFi, GPRS or 3G. The rationalebehind this decision is that most of todays phones haveat least one way of connecting to the Internet and thatmost universities offer free WiFi connection for its stu-dents inside its premises.

Duplicate Answers: It is imperative to restrict the stu-dent of providing more than one answer to a specificquestions. Failure to achieve this feature might re-sult in inaccurate statistical charts presented to thelecturer. The simplest method of achieving the de-sired effect is to assign user accounts to every stu-dent and restrict the accounts of providing more thanone answer. However this conflicts with the featureof anonymity, thus rendering it impossible to use ac-counts. The mechanism of achieving this feature with-out violation students’ anonymity is left for the con-crete implementation of our architecture, although weprovide an example in our reference implementationof the mobile clickers audience response system in thenext section.

Question/Answer Correspondence: Students need toknow which question they are answering to and shouldnot be allowed to answer questions they are not sup-posed to. This problem is solved by assigning a uniquecode to every issued question which the students willinput before they provide their answer. The code willbe generated by the system moments before the ques-tion is answered and will be presented by the lectureronly to the class of students who should answer thequestion.

Dynamic Number of Answers: Not all multiple choicequestions will have the same number of possible an-swers. Usually, they are in the range of two, for true-false questions, to six answers. The system should al-low the lecturer of specifying a concrete number ofpossible answers and this should be reflected at thestudents mobile device screen. The way this could beachieved is by using a mechanism for dynamic genera-tion of the answering form on the mobile device whichwill provide custom screens for every amount of possi-ble answers.

Using our proposed architecture does not only solve theproblems identified in the reviewed AR systems, but it alsoprovides extra features that are crucial for the adoption ofthe mobile clickers audience response system.

5. REALIZATION OF CLICK’N’GAGEClick’N’Gage is the reference implementation of the mobileclickers audience response system, developed in partial ful-fillment of the Industrial Group Project module at City Col-lege. As the proposed architectural design implies, the sys-tem is composed of two main components: the mobile clientand the main system dashboard. Design-wise, both of thecomponents were developed as separate systems in a vac-uum [10]. Consequently, each of them has been targeted to

Figure 1: Architectural overview of a mobile clickers audience response system.

a different user group, leading to design decision specific forthe targeted audience. The users of the mobile client are thestudents themselves, whereas the users of the dashboard arethe university’s lecturers.

The mobile client has been developed for the Java platform,using the Java Micro Edition 2.0 SDK. Considering the factthat more than 2.1 million mobile devices are pre-installedwith a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), is a justification enoughfor choosing the Java platform. Additionally, this allowsfor easier distribution due to Java’s ”Write once, run any-where!” nature. The application is packaged as a standardJava Archive (JAR) file which is guaranteed to run on everyJava enabled mobile device.

5.1 Students’ Mobile ClientSimplicity and usability are two invariants present through-out the mobile client system. It is imperative for the studentto easily answer a given question, with minimal involvement.The only tasks required from the student are to enter thequestion code and to provide the question answer. This isachieved by using only two forms which can be observed inFigure 2.

Internally, the mobile client is in a constant communica-tion with the core Click’N’Gage application. This has beenachieved with the use of SOAP-enabled Web Services (WS).Part of the core functionality has been exposed on the In-ternet in a form of a WS, offering two operations:

• Validate the question code and return the number ofpossible answers for the corresponding question

• Submit the student’s answer to the specific question

The mobile client has access to the service endpoint and con-nects upon initialization. The operations of the Web Serviceare then invoked as needed. The function flow diagram (Fig-ure 3) provides a more detailed explanation, clearly stating

Figure 2: The main screens presented to the stu-dent.

all of the steps performed by the system and the input re-quired from the user for a successful execution.

Finally, all of the five key characteristics of a mobile audienceresponse system with the exception of Question/Answer Cor-respondence are developed exclusively in the mobile client.The following few paragraphs discuss each of them in greaterdetail.

Anonymity vs. Duplicate Answers. Trust is one of themajor issues that students have with audience response sys-tems used in educational settings. Their main concern isthat their performance, while answering the given questionsin class, will affect their grade in an often negative way. Forthis reason, the Click’N’Gage system does not use the usualnotion of accounts which is present in commercial audienceresponse systems. This however, conflicts with the necessityto control students to answer each question only once.

The solution implemented for this two conflicting issues isthe use a unique identifier of the mobile device. Every man-

Figure 3: Function flow diagram for the mobileclient.

ufactured mobile device, whether it is a GSM, WCDMA,iDEN or a satellite phone, has a unique International Mo-bile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number assigned to it. Thenumber is usually printed inside the batter compartment ofthe mobile device. Using Java’s ability to read the propertiesof the mobile device, the IMEI number is acquired which isprocessed by a hash function, together with the issue date ofthe question, and sent with every answer to the server. Thisin turn ensures that no question will be answered more thanonce from a device with the same IMEI number and becausethere are no meaningful information enclosed in the hash itis impossible to track back the number to the specific user.The hash is computed on both the IMEI number and theissue date of the question answered to ensure that the samehash will not repeat itself on more than one question whichwith some careful statistical analysis might lead to mappingthe hash value to a student.

Dynamic Form Generation. Click’N’Gage offers lecturersthe ability to specify the number of possible answers toa question, varying from the minimum of two answers, tothe maximum of six. This feature however, leads to consis-tency issues with the screens of the mobile device. The formpresent on the screen of the mobile device must offer thesame number of choices as the question has. This has beenachieved by modifying the Web Service operation, whichperforms the validation of the question code, to return thenumber of possible answers for said question. Afterwards,the form of choices is dynamically generated, according tothis number.

Connectivity. One of the goals of Click’N’Gage is to allowstudents to use their preferred typed of connection (WAP,WiFi, GPRS or 3G) to connect their mobile clients to thecore server of the application. Fortunately, Java ME offersan abstract way of establishing connections. Using Java’sGeneric Connection Framework, the mobile client is devel-oped in such a way that it only needs an active Internetconnection, without requiring the details of the type of theconnection and how it is established. The framework auto-matically extracts this data from the native operating sys-tem of the mobile device. Because privacy is a crucial con-cept throughout the development of Click’N’Gage, this datais not accessed without the user’s consent.

5.2 Lecturers’ DashboardSimilarly with the mobile client, the lecturers’ dashboard hasbeen developed with two invariants present in the system:intuition and innovation. The dashboard is developed asa web application which offers novel and innovative way ofinteracting with the lecturer and presenting data. It acts asa management portal of the core Click’N’Gage application.

Click’N’Gage has been developed as a Java Enterprise Edi-tion (EE) 6.0 application. It runs on a Glassfish V3.0 ap-plication server, and is connected to a database stored ona MySQL Community Edition Server 5.1.47. The presenta-tion layer of the overall application is handled by the recentlyupdated Java Server Faces 2.0 technology, which now allowsfor clear web site development using XHTML, while at thesame time exposing custom tags with the ability to accessdata encapsulated in the Java application. The flow of theinternal execution of Click’N’Gage is depicted in Figure 4,which emphasizes the core steps performed when an answeris submitted to the system.

Prior to using the system, lecturers must register and createtheir account with Click’N’Gage using the web registrationform. In order to prevent misuse of the system, upon thecompletion of the registration, the lecturer needs to wait foran official acceptance e-mail from the system’s administra-tor, who is responsible for maintaining Click’N’Gage.

Once registered, the lecturer is able to:

Enroll on a course - Enrolling on a course signifies thatthe lecturer is teaching the specific course. Lecturer’scan only browse, create and issue questions for coursesthat they teach.

Create a course - If a lecturer starts a new course at theuniversity, he/she must first create it in the system byspecifying the course name and its unique code.

Create a question - Creating a question involves the lec-turer stating the question, providing some keywordswhich describe it (keywords are used in refining thesearch results), providing the possible answers and spec-ifying the correct one, and finally selecting the type ofchart in which the results will be displayed.

Browse existing questions - Upon selecting a course, thelecturer will be presented with a list of questions forthe specific course. In the case of a long list, which

Figure 4: Detailed architectural diagram of the core Click’N’Gage system.

Figure 5: Example of a time-series statistical chart.

would be the result of using the system for few years,the lecturer can refine the search by filtering the searchresults using the keywords specified when creating thequestion. Clicking on an entry in the presented listwill redirect the lecturer to the statistics page for theselected question, and clicking on the Issue link next toevery question will generate the unique question code,used by the students to answer the question.

Using JFreeChart, an open source chart generation libraryimplemented in the Java programming language, we offer avariety of statistical charts to the lecturer. Every questionhas a time-series chart which represents the success rate ofthe question over time (Figure 5). It calculates the amountof correct answers submitted to every question instance andit presents a graph where the domain axis is the set of dateswhen the specific question has been issued to the students,and the range axis is the set of percentages of correct an-swers submitted for the question. This type of charts isparticularly useful for the self-evaluation of lecturers.

Figure 6: Sample chart types.

Additionally, every issued question has a corresponding chartillustrating the results from the students answers (Figure 6).The type of the chart is the one specified when the ques-tion is first created, possible choices being Bar, Bar 3D,

Pie, Pie 3D charts. An innovative feature implementedin Click’N’Gage is the dynamic generation of the imagesrepresenting the charts whenever they are requested fromthe browser or when embedded in a MicrosoftTM Power-Point presentation. When a user navigates its browser tohttp://x.x.x.x/clickngage/charts/IQC.png, the systemautomatically locates the question specified with the code,recalculates the submitted answers and returns an updatedchart every time. The same holds for the time-series charts,with the only difference in the request URL which ishttp://x.x.x.x/clickngage/timeseries/QID.png. Thisfeature is specifically useful when embedding result chartsin various presentations and reports.

Last, but not least, it is important to mention that the webapplication has been developed using the Web 2.0 standards,

which include asynchronous AJAX communication with theserver, full XHTML and CSS conformance and a design fol-lowing the Web 2.0 guidelines.

6. EVALUATIONClick’N’Gage has been demoed at the 9th Student SpringSymposium, organized annually at City College, Thessa-loniki. The presentation included a detailed discussion of thesystem. After the presentation, the students in the audiencegot an opportunity to participate in the system evaluation.Over 30 students took part in the evaluation. Firstly, theywere required to download the mobile application from ourweb site. Then, a question and a list of possible answerswere displayed on the projector. The students chose an an-swer and submitted it via mobile application. After that,the output was displayed in graphical notation. Finally, thestudents gave us feedback on the system. The feedback waspositive and few interesting observations were discussed ingreater detail.

Everyone at the symposium agreed that Click’N’Gage canimprove the traditional practices in education. Before eval-uation, many students considered that the system would beunnecessary. However, later they enjoyed using it and sawthe benefit for both students and lecturers. What studentsliked the most was that everyone was welcome to participatein class. Also, they liked the simplicity and usability of themobile application. The lecturers were particularly satisfiedwith the instant feedback received from the student.

Furthermore, before evaluation, some lecturers consideredthat activities related to designing questions and using mo-bile clickers in class can be time consuming. They ques-tioned the benefit of the system by stressing the operationalcosts. However, after the demonstration, they accepted thatbenefits of using the system are far more important thanthe overhead of creating questions before class. In addi-tion to this, lecturers made couple of interesting suggestions.Namely, they would like to see the system integrated withthe existing Learning Management Systems (LMS), such asClaroline - the one used at City College, in order to takesome of the advantages that those systems offer.

Nevertheless, both students and lecturers agreed at the endthat Click’N’Gage can keep students more focused and pro-vide better communication. Therefore, the system providesthe means for enhancing classroom learning. However, theoutcome of such teaching could not be evaluated. Only theuse of the system for a longer period of time (couple of years)can show the actual outcome of this approach to teaching.

7. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKClassroom interaction at universities is considered to be veryimportant. The recent advances in mobile technologies haveenabled the use of mobile phones in the classrooms as atool for the mutual benefit for both students and lecturers.Furthermore, the mobile phones provide notable extensionover the traditional clickers. By providing support for bet-ter communication between students and lecturers, mobilephones are expected to improve the learning outcome as well.

Our software, Click’N’Gage, provides a support for betterinteractivity in classrooms. The lecturers find the immedi-

ate feedback from students to be very helpful. They can usefeedback to reevaluate and improve their teaching methods.The students, on the other hand, can easily participate inclassroom discussions while using this system. The systemprovides anonymity and it is simple to use, therefore, it en-courages students’ engagement in the classroom. Moreover,lecturers have insights on statistical data that is generatedover significant period of time. This motivates lecturer touse the system.

The Click’N’Gage software application is built in a modularapproach. The modularity supports extensibility. There-fore, many possible future extensions are possible for oursystem. One possible future extension includes porting theJava mobile application to both iPhone and Android. Thecurrent version of the Click’N’Gage does not support thesetwo popular mobile platforms. Furthermore, another possi-ble extension is the integration of Click’N’Gage with LMS.Such integration would keep the overhead of creating andenrolling courses by lecturer minimized. Last but not least,the system could, in the future, support student assessmentin the form of quizzes and tests.

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