@Vincent-Seb-Wu and I made this app for Application Lab, a course at NYU Shanghai, during sophomore year.
Socrates is a web app connected to Google Firebase. It enhances classroom participation by enabling the professor to randomly pick students to cold call.
When a class begins, the prof and all students go to Socrates and enter their names. When the prof asks a question, he/she can click "choose", and the system will choose N students randomly. The chosen students will see "You have been chosen! Rate your willingness to answer the question." After they rate their willingness, the system picks the highest ranking student to answer the question.
Random cold calling {
- Forces every student to focus
- Gives the prof an easy time to pick students
}.
Rating willingness to answer and picking the highest avoids the kind of situations where a student gets picked, has nothing to say, and BS for quite some time, wasting everyone's time.
Socrates started as a paper prototype. I made UI components with paper and crafted them together, as a draft process.
Socrates is made in REACT. It connects to Firebase to achieve multi-client communication. The communication is not secure, though.
We made the animation simple, avoiding any distraction that may hurt the classroom experience.
Daniel Chin 2018/12/18