Bluetad Mobile Application

Everyday college professors deal with many tasks. Some of these tasks are directly related to education, others are not. For instance, professors must keep record of student attendance which is very often done by passing around a sign-in sheet and then manually entering data into a computer in order to generate and send attendance reports. Automating non-educational tasks allows instructors to focus on improving their teaching. Furthermore, using technology for educational tasks improves the classroom learning experience. For example, in some active learning techniques, instructors may survey the classroom to get feedback on student knowledge and clarify misconceptions. However, this practice is only effective if students participate. Often students restrain from answering in class mainly due to the fear of being wrong. Having a method such as an electronic polling using mobile devices to quickly and anonymously get students to speak their mind may increase student participation.

Developing a comprehensive mobile application to facilitate faculty tasks will ultimately result in a superior classroom experience. This is the focus of the Bluetad mobile application project. During its starting phase, Bluetad features will include automated attendance keeping and in-class electronic polling. To achieve this, the Bluetad mobile application will carry out a node discovery technique employing Bluetooth LE (BLE) technology to create intermittent local networks. These networks will address the built-in transmission range limitation of BLE (30 meters) by having nodes discover other neighboring nodes and populate them in a data table. This data will then be routed to the sink node which will hold the data for all nodes within a determined area.

Bluetad’s long term goal is to keep adding functionalities that will address classroom limitations and challenges in order to improve the learning experience and progress education.

Author(s):

Jonathan Montañez    
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Universidad del Turabo
Puerto Rico

José Almodóvar-Faría    
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Universidad del Turabo
Puerto Rico