Invasion of the clickers

Ok, this is exciting: the professor that I'm TAing for wants to introduce clickers in class starting next semester. This is supposed to make the class more fun and probably easier to grade (we'll see about that). The class is about introducing CS to non-CS majors. It's a new class (it was introduced last semester) and I think the university wanted to have such a class because of the decreasing number of students enrolled in the computer science program at Rutgers. Computers are still cool, people. And software engineers are still well-paid (#1 job according to some article I read on the internet about 2 months ago, probably written by software-engineers who also run the internet - coincidence?). So clickers are supposed to make the class even cooler. And they are already used for lectures in some of the departments, which is great because... there are people who used them and survived.

We want to use the clickers not only for quizzes, but also during lectures, when we want students to participate. We'll have to implement everything, because the software that the clicker comes with (I really hope there's any!) is just the very basic. Also, the clicker is the 4-key type of clicker. So, we'll have to think (and, most importantly, make the English, art history, etc majors think) binary (because we'll need one key to cancel the answer and one other key just in case).

So what we now have is some mysterious clicker that can be connected to the computer. When used, it spits a log with what's going on (keys that were pressed). Now, all we need to do is write a device driver for the USB and engineer some pretty software that will happily live with it. Oh man, I remember the operating systems design class I was taking in college, i swore to stay away from device drivers for the rest of my life. Well, I guess the "never say never" saying applies here..