A week ago Tuesday, we had our triannual (?) ITS all-staff meeting. As we walked into the meeting, we were given a clicker. Penn State has chosen the Interwrite PRS RF clicker as our publishing company independent solution to student feedback. You can read more about clickers at the Penn State clicker support site.
We were told not to turn the clicker on until the demonstration later in the meeting. As explained in an earlier post, I turned it on immediately. As you can see from the images on the support site, the clicker has the digits 0-9, a decimal point, the letters A-E, a minus sign, a T, and an F button. What I was doing was checking the variety of inputs one could give after I stumbled across the code to the receiver. I think the main use of these are to vote given a multiple choice (i.e. A-E), or True/False question. The interesting thing is that there are other possibilities given the inputs:
- An hexadecimal answer, e.g., FD230 (using the F from T/F)
- An exponential answer, e.g., 6.022E23 (E to denote 10 to the power of)
- Any number of computer geek words, e.g., D00D or DECAFBAD
The only downside of the exponential notation was I couldn't seem to use the minus sign to negate the exponent, e.g. –1.602E-19. Pressing the minus sign only seemed to change the sign of the mantissa (I admit I had to look this up) rather than the exponent.
I have no idea what the back end of this service looks like, but it seems to be an interesting technology.
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