Personal Response Systems, or "clickers," are rapidly becoming a ubiquitous presence in university classrooms. Numerous studies in STEM disciplines have demonstrated the positive benefits that the use of such systems can have. Regrettably, in these theoretically abstract subjects an instructor’s use of personal response systems is hindered by the inability to ask anything other than multiple-choice questions or questions requiring short alphanumeric responses. We developed a mobile application called uRespond to overcome the limiting types of questions of traditional clicker systems by allowing for free-form student input such as drawing, graphing, calculation, or structure creation and manipulation. This paper describes some problems with university STEM education and how our personal response system addresses them. There is discussion of the system concept building, development methodology, technical details and results of preliminary user testing. Finally it concludes with a discussion of lessons learned and future work for the system.

Recommended Citation: Herrmann A., Reinicke B., Vetter R., Clark U., Grove N., (2012). uRespond: A Classroom Response System on the iPad . UNCW MS CSIS Proceedings. V. 6 , N. 7 .