Classroom Response System using Mobile Phones and 2D barcodes

Sahar M. Ba Zaid, Haya I. Al-Darrab, Aseel F. Al-Turki, Hanan S. Al-Mazyd, Deema F. Al-Moshegeh, Sara S. alAsraj, Hatoon Y. Al-Darrab Information Technology Department, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Mobile_wikipedia@hotmail.com

Abstract this paper presents the idea of a Mobile Snapshot Response system, which uses the cameraintegrated within mobile phones and a two dimensional barcode to leverage student interaction in the classroom. The potential objective of the system is to increase the connectivity between the instructor and the student by offering the student the opportunity to evaluate the lecture content and send inquires to the instructor after class. Keywords- Mobile phones; 2D barcodes; Elearning; Mobile Learning; Class Particpation
I.

INTRODUCTION

Mobiles and Internet have become an important aspect of our lives. The comfort and convenience they provide certainly made our lives and our learning in particular much easier than ever before. One brilliant feature in mobile phones is the ability to access the Internet anytime and anywhere, thus, enabling us to seek information when we need it. M-Learning (Mobile-Learning) is a new learning approach that benefits from mobile phones to create comfortable learning environments for learners. Some of these environments use the built-in digital cameras found in mobile phones to scan a Two-Dimensional bar code and resolve the bar code into a webpage that contains information about the scanned object. Two-Dimensional bar codes such as SemaCode[1] and Quick Response[2] (QR) System are two wellknown ways used to reach internet resources. These systems work by generating a "tag" that contains an embedded URL used to reach a specific web page. Mobile phones equipped with digital cameras are then used to scan the tag and displays the corresponding web page. The idea of utilizing the capabilities of modern mobile phones with 2D bar codes is very promising especially

in the educational field. Therefore, in this project, we intend to build an M-Learning system that uses the technology of Two-Dimensional bar code with the capabilities of Camera-equipped mobile phones. The system that we will build will be called Snapshot Response System (SSR). The SSR system will help educators and instructors evaluate students' degree of comprehension, by giving out short assessments, and allowing feedback on the overall course evaluation at the end of each semester. Also, the system will help students send their inquiries directly to the instructor after each lecture. To further discuss our potential project the paper is organized as follows: in section 2, the motivations and goals for initiating such a project are outlined. In section 3, related works are discussed. Section 4, the proposed system is demonstrated and in section 5 we conclude the paper with future directions.
II.
MOTIVATIONS AND GOALS

Many instructors in academia wish to know how much their students understand the content of the lecture, and doing this manually will be very difficult and time consuming task. Similarly, most students have communication problems with their instructors, and they wish if they can ask their questions without any fear. So a need for a technology to bridge these gaps is becoming apparent in our rapidly changing world. Our proposed system, The Snapshot Response System, has originated in order to solve the previous problems and to achieve the following goals:

Automation by enabling students to access the internet via mobile phones. Save time and effort by collecting students' inquiries electronically, correcting short assessments automatically and displaying students statistics. Increase interactivity between instructors and students. Make a difference in education.
Figure 3.is it important to you to ensure that you have understood the lecture?

To check whether our proposed system will succeed in achieving its goals, we need to check first our students readiness for embracing such a technology. A survey was distributed among the students of Information Technology department at the College of Computer and Information Science-King Saud University, Riyadh, in order to check the students' awareness of Mobile response systems such as QR Code, and to measure the possibility of applying such a system by checking their mobile phone readiness. The results of the survey are presented in Figure 1, 2, 3 and 4

Figure 4. Do you know about QR or SemaCode technology?

Figure 1. Does your mobile have a digital camera?

As shown from the students responses, our system has a big chance to succeed. From the technical side of the project the students' mobile phones are equipped with digital cameras. Also students use their mobile phones to access the internet. Most importantly, both students and instructors were interested in testing the extent of students' comprehension.
III.
RELATED WORK

Figure 2. Have you ever used the internet via mobile phones?

The Two-Dimensional bar code stores data along two dimensions and is therefore capable of containing much more information than the One-Dimensional bar code (seen on many food products) or the magnetic stripe (seen on credit cards and some drivers' licenses). Specifically Two-Dimensional bar code can hold about 2,000 bytes of data, or enough to encode some text and a compressed image file. Two-Dimensional bar code technology were initially developed for Medicine [3], Press [4], and many other fields, also applications for Two-Dimensional bar code technology have recently found a great growth with the spread of camera phones.

In m-learning, camera phones provide an essential tool for capturing, sharing, and reflecting on learning experiences [5]. They can be used to capture images or video for assessment purposes. Camera phones can be used to access information and resources through 2D barcodes. Some of the most powerful examples of m-learning are when learners are truly mobile. Sharing in a realtime event is MediaBoard [6]. MediaBoard lets you host such events with ease. The MediaBoard is a flexible, web-based tool which lets learners build up online web pages by sending messages, pictures and audio from their phones. Authors can set up their own online MediaBoards and use these for a great variety of mobile and interactive learning tasks and projects, such as:

IV.

PROPOSED SYSTEM

Working as a team to give and receive directions and instructions or negotiate and agree how to solve a problem Making enquiries, conducting interviews or surveys, and recording speech or other audio Learning about and using the Internet and mobile technologies.

Figure 5.System Configuration

There are many other m-learning projects that concentrated on the use of camera phones such as the "HELLO" project. At "HELLO"[7] (Handheld English Language Learning Organization) the project team integrates the 2D barcodes, camera phones, the Internet, mobile computing and database technologies. The aim of this system is that students can perform mobile context-aware learning to improve their English effectively at anytime and anywhere. Another example is Fujimura and Doi project [8], in this project the team has developed a system for students to answer questions about the class and send some comments to the teacher using mobile phones and QR codes in the middle of each class. Although the idea of this project is very similar to our proposed system, yet, we plan on adding new functionalities to the system as will be describe in section 4. The above projects showed us the importance of applying m-Learning using mobile phones. So, we are going to utilize mobile phones technology to provide a new educational environment in our collage, which will make it easy for teachers to deliver knowledge to students in a more convenient way.

We will develop a system that enforce the communication between student and instructor through mobile phones and QR code technology. The main goal of our system is to ensure the educator that the lecture has been understood as intended before moving on to next lecture. Our system is divided into two subsystems that communicate with each other: web interface system and mobile interface system as shown in Figure 5. Mainly, there will be a site that contains a page for every instructor.
A. Web Interface System for the instructor

The instructor teaches students different courses; each instructor has a web site that contains all courses he/she teaches. The site allows the instructor to prepare a short assessment, which may be on every lecture. The instructor can edit or delete the assessments. The assessment consists of several close ended questions. However, the system provides some level of flexibility. The instructor has the option to give different assessments for different sections related to the same lecture. The instructor can summarize the results of each question in each assessment using charts and according to the instructor choice, i.e. lecture, section or assessment. The system provides another mean of communication between the instructor and the student. It will collect students' inquiries then display them according to lecture. To focus on the most frequently asked questions

and give some questions a priority, the system will use some kind of text mining techniques to extract important topics.
B. Mobile Interface System for the student

V.

CONCLUSION

In the mobile interface system we will use Quick Response (QR) code technology. QR code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation in 1994 (see Figure 6). QR uses convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users.

Recent interest in M-Learning applications has greatly increased. One of these applications is the utilization of mobile devices in student evaluation and education. We envision the potential of using our proposed system, i.e. SSR system, in improving the communications between instructors and their students and in providing students with the ability to raise questions and comments without embarrassment. Moreover, by using our proposed system, the students will be able to answer short assessments at the end of each class in an easy and convenient way. Thus, our proposed system will benefit the instructors as well as students and improve the delivery of lectures by getting a timely feedback and by automatically analyzing students' answers.

Figure 6. QR code The QR Code will store instructor URL address as a 2D barcode. The student will then access a mobile interface by scanning the instructor's QR tag using his/her mobile camera phone and internet capable mobile phone. To fully benefit from our system, the student has to complete a registration phase, in order to become a member. Then he/she can answer the short assessment. When the student submits his/her answers, the model answers will be displayed on his/her mobile phone screen. Naturally, the student can not answer the same assessment more than once, thus emphasizing the importance of registration. Moreover, the student can send his/her inquiries about any misunderstood information, anytime before the next lecture, using a special form in our service.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We wish to thank Dr. Hend Al-Khalifa, our supervisor for her great support and continued supervision; we also thank her for believing in us.

REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

[8]

http://www.semacode.com/ http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ http://www.nearfield.org/downloads/Near_field_inte ractions_papers.pdf http://semacode.org/about/press/clips/2004-10-09nyt/ http://www.elearning.ac.uk/innoprac/learner/southa mpton.html www.mboard.org.uk Y.Chu and T.Liu, " Handheld Computer Supported Context-aware learning with 2D Barcodes," in Seventh IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, pp. 485-486, 2007. N.Fujimura and M.Doi,"Collecting Students Degree of Comprehension," in Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services, pp. 123-127, 2006.