{"id":65,"date":"2018-08-28T16:07:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T16:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.staff.ncl.ac.uk\/michele.pozzi\/?page_id=65"},"modified":"2018-08-28T16:15:05","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T16:15:05","slug":"arsino","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.staff.ncl.ac.uk\/michele.pozzi\/teaching\/arsino\/","title":{"rendered":"ARSino: a light and simple Audience Response System (ARS)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I developed ARSino in Autumn 2017 and used it in the academic year 2017-18 at Newcastle University. More info on the history in the blog post of the same title<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ARSino is made of two main components: the Presenter\u2019s Console and the Audience interface. The former is used by the presenter to activate the question he\u2019s seeking answer to and to show the bar graphs of responses. The latter is used by the audience to answer\/vote and get some feedback on their actions. For the creation of the questions themselves, I have not created any interface as the database components of web2py allow the ease manipulation of tables, which also includes the creation of questions.<\/p>\n

Presenter\u2019s Console<\/h3>\n

This is designed to be displayed on a large screen, typically via a projector. Expected resolution is Full HD, but works well on somewhat lower ones.<\/p>\n

To keep things simple, when the question is first shown, all the bars are present, but with 0%. The presenter would ask the audience to vote and then refresh the page (standard browser function, such as ctrl+R) to see the page populated with the most recent data. I often refreshed a few times, just to make sure we captured also the later votes. But you might want to do it only once after a good time, to prevent peer-influence on the voting.<\/p>\n

As you can see in this screenshot, the following question was not easy for the students (note that although by then I had explained polarisation P and the d33-mode of operation, I had not mentioned stacked actuators, so the students had only a few minutes to \u201cinvent\u201d the multilayer stacks):<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Inventing the piezoelectric multilayer stack actuators<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The presenter\u2019s interaction with ARSino happens via the Menu item visible just under the title (\u201cQuestions in session\u201d). It\u2019s a drop down menu where all the questions assigned to the current session (1207A<\/em> in this case) are displayed and can be made active. The ARSino controller<\/em> (as in Model-View-Controller<\/a>) will search the database for such questions and populate the menu automatically. The allocation of questions to a session is done with the web2py database interface. Without a hope to fully explain this here, this is the list of tables specific to ARSino:<\/p>\n