Promptly
Promptly is a project I made for my University to provide real-time feedback in the classroom. "Clickers" are placed on the desks and students use those to submit responses. I did all of the UI, embedded and application software, as well as hardware designs and 3D printed the clicker housing. Embedded code includes BLE and LoRa.
What went into it?
1. Technical Planning
I had to decide on a technical solution that met the following criteria:
Professors can create polls to ask students questions and receive real-time feedback
Students are unable to answer the same question more than once
Minimal friction for students to answer - no logging into an account, pulling out your phone, opening any apps, etc.
WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared, LoRa?
What does the input mechanism look like?
How will we power the thing?
How do we distinguish between individual clickers?
Questions To Be Answered
2. UI Design
I learned a while back that if I do my design while building things out, I make ugly software. And nobody likes to use ugly software.
3. Hacking Away
4. Hardware Design
With all the software done, I needed to design a housing and assembly to put everything in
5. Assembly
The best part of this project was seeing everything come together in the end. It all fit together beautifully in this little black box and worked like a charm!