How to use the Clicker


Setup

Place clicker.html, Clicker.class, clicker.jar, and runServer in a directory on your webserver. Link to clicker.html from the course website. Before class starts, log into the webserver and run ./runServer.

Viewing results

Place clicker.jar, jcommon-0.9.7.jar and jfreechart-0.9.21.jar on your laptop. From a command prompt in the directory you placed the jar files, execute:
java -cp "clicker.jar;jfreechart-0.9.21.jar;jcommon-0.9.7.jar" Viewer <webserver>
Where <webserver> is replaced with the DNS name of your webserver. You will get a window:

The clicker server collects button clicks from the applet on the clicker.html page. When the server receives a button click from the applet, it records the response under the current question. For each question, the server keeps track of which IP addresses have responded (corresponding to individual laptops). When the view reports the results, it has two panes: one which reports results where each IP address is represented once, the other allows multiple responses from each student.

Typical usage involves the instructor asking the question and indicating that a clicker response is desired. Students click in their responses. The instructor clicks the "Results" button on the viewer to see the results (possibly projecting them). When the instructor wants to ask another clicker question, they first click "New" to get a fresh, empty, bucket for the student responses. The instructor can cycle through previously asked questions by using the "Next" and "Prev" buttons. The "Shutdown" button shuts down the server.

Alterations

The buttons on the clicker applet can be changed by editing Clicker.java, changing the buttons created in the init() method, and then recompiling the java code using the Makefile.