Move over PRS: Interactive classrooms with Perl

By JT Smith on March 30, 2012 3:00 AM

A. Sinan Unur will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Personal response systems (PRS) are small, dedicated pieces of hardware with a bunch of buttons on them. They transmit key presses to a dedicated receiver.

PRS are used in large classrooms to track and measure student attendance and participation, and to record responses to questions interspersed in a lecture. The software that comes with these systems is usually closed source, not-extensible, and generally lame.

Twilio provides a service that will contact a web application at a designated URL in response to text messages. Cell phones with messaging are almost ubiquitous on college campuses these days. Using mobile phones students already have along with open source software would alleviate a lot of the headaches teachers go through when implementing proprietary solutions.

I am putting together such a system using the Perl web application framework Dancer. The system will include a web interface for the lecturer to manage questions, visualize responses etc, and I hope it will demonstrate the superiority of such a system to a combination of clunky proprietary hardware and software.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]