Project Deliverables
Term 1
Term 2
Term 3
Term 4
- Short Paper
- Seminar 3 Slides
- Project Thesis
Background
Project Details
| Project Name: | An SMS-based Student Response System |
|---|---|
| Principle Investigator: | David Brown |
| Supervised By: | James Connan |
| Research Institute: | Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa |
Project Goals
- To develop a modular network architecture that will provide a platform for creating an SMS-based Student Response System.
- To expose the functionality of the system as a web service.
- To develop a prototype client application to make use of the exposed web service.
- To determine whether this system could be used to solve the issues designed in the problem statement above.
- To develop an application for Android that can be used to answer quizzes over the network and eliminate human error in answer formats.
Project Deliverables
Project Summary
Useful Links
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- Open Source Software-Defined Radio: A survey on GNUradio and its applications
- SMS Based Wireless Home Appliance Control System(HACS) for Automating Appliances and Security
- Student Response System
- Using Audience Response Technology for Pretest Reviews in an Undergraduate Nursing Course
Project Summary
The goal of this project is to develop a Student Response System (SRS) that will make use of SMS to allow interaction in class. The system must allow students to answer quizzes and sign in for lectures via their cellphones. Current SRSs require that students be provided with personal response units, or clickers. In big classes, this can get expensive. An SMS-based SRS is desirable as it will allow students to interact via their own cellphones, thus eliminating this expense.
To implement this system, a system architecture had to be developed. To allow for future extensions, the following modular architecture was designed:
Database Design
To design the database for the system, it was important to analyse the requirements to find out what the inputs and outputs of the system would be. Students would be inputting answers to quizzes and codes for class registers.
Facilitators would be doing all the administrative work as well as getting statistics and reports out of the system. The system itself would be required to mark quizzes.
With the basic inputs and outputs uncovered, the following database was designed:
Backend Design
The backend of the system contains the HTTP Gateway and the SMS Gateway. The HTTP Gateway consists of layers. The first of these layers is the HTTP Interface, which exposes the functionality of the system
over HTTP so that clients can be built to interact with it without regard to the platform they are built on.
The second layer is the Data Model, which is responsible for all interactions with the database.
The SMS Gateway is accessed via the HTTP Interface. It is responsible for the SMS functionality of the system. It achieves this functionality by sending AT commands to an attached GSM modem or by interacting with a USRP, which is providing a GSM picocell.
Client Applications
The client applications developed for this system were a website, which was created for use by facilitators to create courses, tasks, roll calls, etc and to view reports and statistics for these courses, as well
as a well as an Android application, which provided students with a GUI to use to answer questions and sign in for roll calls. The app then compiles the messages into a predefined format, abstracting this
step away from the students.
The completed system can be illustrated as follows:
