An Interactive Wireless Classroom
Michael Kubovy, Psychology
1995 TTI Fellow
Email:
Project website: http://minerva.acc.virginia.edu/~mklab/101.dir/101.html
Mr. Michael Kubovy has come up with a novel solution to the problem of student participation in large classes. Each student in an introductory psychology course will participate (anonymously) in psychology experiments in the classroom by means of a wireless keypad. Each student's responses to a question (such as multiple-choice question used in quizzes, or rating on a scale of 1 to 7 used in personality inventories) will be recorded by each keypad, sent to a computer, and automatically analyzed. Within a few seconds, the computer will graphically summarize the results and display them to the instructor and to the class. The system has an additional advantage in that it allows the instructor to perform in-class experiments that were hitherto confined to the psychology laboratory because they require the measurement of reaction time.Psychology differs from other disciplines in that many of its phenomena can be demonstrated on the students themselves. Instructors of introductory psychology, such as the University's own Raymond Bice, invest considerable resources in staging demonstrations of these phenomena, most of which, unfortunately, use a few volunteers from the class. Mr. Kubovy's project will overcome this limitation. With his new system, he will dramatize basic principles of psychology by involving each student personally in the acquisition and analysis of data that are essential to contemporary psychology. Mr. Kubovy believes these tools will be of wide use in teaching (and not only in higher education). In every discipline, instructors wish they could assess how well students have understood what they were just taught. This is especially acute in large classes in which only the confident students respond to the instructor's questions. Using Mr. Kubovy's system, a professor need only ask a few milestone questions during the lecture. The class-wide results would be available within seconds and the instructor could adjust the presentation accordingly. The central component of Mr. Kubovy's project is the wireless keypad, a prototype of which is being developed by students working under Professor Maite Brandt-Pearce in the Department of Electrical Engineering. This device, which will use infra-red technology, will send timing, keypad, and address information to a single computer. The processing of four hundred nearly simultaneous signals presents a formidable problem. Kubovy and the electrical engineering team have solved this problem using a proprietary scheme to control the flood of data issued from the wireless devices.