Developing Electronic Classroom Response Apps for a Wide Variety of Mobile Devices: Lessons Learned from the PINGO project

Classroom response systems (CRSs) have proven to turn students into active participants in lectures. Thus, these systems help to improve the students’ learning performance in traditional head-on lectures. Peer Instruction is a teaching and learning approach that makes very specific use of Classroom Response Systems elements: similar to the ask-the-audience lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, students get involved in the lecture by using clickers to answer multiplechoice questions posed by the instructor. Depending on the answer distribution the students are encouraged to discuss their answers with their peers. After some time of peer discussion the instructor poses the question again. In our efforts to develop a web-based application to support Peer Instruction in very large groups, we have faced several issues that we did not take into consideration in the initial design phase of the application. In this paper we share some lessons learned from the development process and report about some oddities found. Author