Clicker Application

Clickers have been a part of the education/entertainment scene now for some years. They are simple remote personal response systems which are used in group situations to answer questions from a group leader. Using clickers with well designed questions encourages more effective, more efficient, and more engaging communication.

Yet clickers are another physical item for users to carry, they have a cost and if they are not available when needed their value diminishes. I developed this .net application to run in a "computer lab" environment as a replacement for a physical clicker. The advantage for the user is that they don't have to buy it and or remember to bring it to a session.

The clicker software consists of 2 applications. One runs on a "master" computer and the other runs on any clients that are attached to the same network. A third element is required for these two applications to interact and that is a MySQL database. The database is a simple two table database which stores the client responses to the questions. Once the users have responded, the "Master" application then retrieves the data from the database and displays it in a window which can be projected for all to see.

I have the Clicker working in 4 "lab" environments running on XP work stations. I have also tested the Clicker on an "upgraded" Vista operating system. All seems to work as expected! I will test it further on a "clean" installation and update this comment accordingly with the results.

Links:

Instructions for downloading and implementing the Clicker Application.