Mitarbeiter
Software project Teaching Evaluation Support with the Digital Pen
project term: SS 2009
bachelor project with support of company Allpen
project group: Carsten Pein, Janko Richter, Hauke Stiefel
technological background
The digital pen uses a technology invented and patented in Sweden. This technology allows to digitise notes written by hand automatically. Similar to a GPS navigation system for road vehicles, the digital pen determines its unique starting position and records all further movements which enables the digital reconstruction of the text written. For this sake, the pen is equipped with a micro-camera which allows to determine the position of current writing by optical means.
In order to enable the pen to determine its unique position of the paper, the underlying sheet must not be a simple blank paper, but rather prepared by a merely unvisible pattern produced by a laser printer. For the human eye this appears grey-shaded. This pattern may be arranged in so many variants that the pen always knows on which paper at which position it is situated even from a bunch of millions of pages. Pattern generation is aranged by licenses of the patent holder. In general, each sheet gets a different pattern.
At the current state-of-practice, the digital pen is mainly used in applications where a computer is not available for data collection or where the data collector is not expected to know how to enter his input into a computer. The main advantage of data input is that the user works like with a normal pen on a normal piece of paper. The digital pen saves all information in its internal storage which can easily be transmitted to a computer by simple docking.
The year before this project started I got to know the company Allpen supervising two diploma theses that were assigned by that company.
project task
So far, FH Wedel uses a web-based evaluation poll for its teaching evaluation at the end of each semester. This allows an automatic analysis and processing of the input of each individual student which is a decisive advantage compared to the paper-based evaluation forms used in previous times. However, the participation rate of the web-based method is considerably lower compared to the paper-based method.
This project had to enable an evaluation poll with the digital pen and, thus, combine the advantages of the web-based with the paper-based method without baring the disadvantages. The feasibility of the solution had to be shown at selected lectures at the end of the semester. The project group had to take care that the results could be transmitted automatically to a computer and analysed there.
results
The project group designed form consisting of 3 pages which essentially contained the questions of the electronic form of the web-based system. This form was digitised by Allpen such that the digital pen could use it. The project group implemented a user interface enabling a lecturer to generate the appropriate number of forms. This number has to be determined before evaluation, because each form needs a different pattern for each different student. Otherwise, the pen could not distinguish different answers from different forms. The pen saves the completed content of the forms in an XML file which allocates each filled-in content to the appropriate question field.
Since an automatic connection to the exisiting web-based evaluation system was not feasible due to the lack of interfaces, the project group implemented an own evaluation software. This software collected the results of the respective answers given in the individual forms and computed mean and variance for each query and each lecture. Furthermore, an output interface was implemented and also an excel export.
FH Wedel bought 3 digital pens. These pens were used to evaluate my lectures Discrete Mathematics and Mathematical Fundamentals of Theoretical Computer Science using the software implemented in this project. For reference reasons, the students participating in the evaluation had to submit their opinion also in the traditional web-based form.
Manual comparisons with the collected forms showed that electronic collection, processing and analysis worked without any error. The result may be inspected here (only accessible for FH Wedel members). For FH Wedel, the advantage of the new method was evident due to the considerably higher participation rate: While 100 % of the audience participated in the new paper-based method with the digital pen, less then 50 % participated in the web-based evaluation. The latter number corresponded to other lectures and was, thus, not biased by the double evaluation.
This software project proved that the application of the digital pen may increase the participation rate at teaching evaluation significantly without much increase of the administration effort.
Nevertheless, a comprehensive application of the new method does not pay off due to economical easons: A single pen including the required software costs more than 300 EUR. Further, the patterns generated require a license fee. It is not acceptable at all to pay license fees for each single evaluation form.
This project worked with reusable licenses for which an annual fee has to be payed. This fee is payed by Allpen. Special administration software has to be produced in order to achieve that the pen does not screw up reused licenses. In the course of this project, an administration software was implemented that granted a reuse of the same licenses in different semesters. Only with the same semester different licenses had to be used for each form. With the number of reusable licenses available to FH Wedel, only 85 different evaluation forms can be processed for one semester. A more comprehensive application can only be performed with more reusable licenses or - which would be the more challenging way for software engineers - with a more sophisticated reuse of the licenses. This gives oppotunities for follow-up projects.