Pupils in Bangalore help a research team in India develop a new mobile barcode system.
A Microsoft Research India team in Bangalore has worked with students and has now come up with a QR code system that uses webcams and sheets of paper displaying the barcodes, in order to identify, gather, and analyze the multiple choice responses of the pupils .
This technology is meant to be an innovative new way to ask students for feedback.
It can help to poll a classroom to either ask the pupils for their opinions or to determine how well they understood a question that has been asked. This QR code polling is meant to work with the results from studies that have shown that by performing student performance evaluations in real time, it can be very helpful for making sure that a class remains highly engaged. Furthermore, it can give teachers greater control over the way that content is adjusted to suit the learning needs of his or her class.
Teachers can also use the QR code feedback to set the pace for the class.
The actual barcodes were printed on cards that were 7 inches by 7 inches. Each contained three black blocks that would allow the Microsoft system to find and recognize the card and its orientation. This also provides the system with the student’s identification.
By using these QR code cards, students are able to answer multiple choice questions with any one of four different answers. All they need to do is orient the card in the correct way.
A computer in the classroom, connected to a webcam, uses a recognition algorithm to scan the card and understand its meaning based on its orientation. It takes a digital image of the responses of all of the students and then detects the elements of the image that are made up of the cards with the black blocks. It then breaks down those elements by recognizing the direction in which the cards are rotated and uses that data to connect the way that the student is holding the card with its associated answer.
Once that is complete, the computer provides the teacher with the rate at which the students are successfully answering the questions. In this way, the QR code provides direct, real time feedback regarding the successful learning of a given lesson.