AbstractsComputer Science

Interaction is an important and essential aspect of the educational learning processes, since it can be used in a wide range of educational settings, in diverse ways (Anderson, 2002). Personal response system technologies (PRS), also known as Clickers, facilitates interactivity with an audience, enabling participants to instantly respond to posed questions and provides a representation of the collected data. The implementation of such systems in real pedagogical settings enables teachers to obtain interactions within big classes while preserving the lesson’s flow (Martyn, 2007).SMS-HIT is a PRS based on mobile devices enabling student interactions via SMS or web, designed and developed in order to support learning and assessment activities in real educational or training situations (Kohen-Vacs, Ronen, & Bar-Ness, 2012). The users create and manage various activities in different topics and pedagogical goals. Types of interactivities offered by this system include voting by selection, free text and submission of quantitative data.A Design based research was conducted in order to evaluate different capabilities that SMS-HIT enables; this study aims to develop additional types of interactions to be added to the system, in order to promote the use of class interaction supported by PRS. During each of the three research iterations, the users’ usage, needs and suggestions have been investigated. According to the findings suitable additions were developed using .NET, combined with JQuery, HTML and CSS.The additional capabilities that have been developed, engage in a new ability of SMS-HIT - sequences activities: creating and managing sequences activities, presenting them and allowing audience to respond to them using mobile devices – one activity after the other.As a result of improving the system, users enjoy new and effective capabilities that were developed to meet these needs. In practice, the use of the SMS-HIT has become wider as more users create varied activities which contains diverse pedagogies.