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Visiting MSR/Bangalore I was shown a neat demo using very simple QRcode-like paper and image recognition. Basically, each student had a paper they could hold up. On the front was a simple QR-code (facing the prof and camera). On the back on the edges were 4 possible answers, something like A/1/YES, B/2/NO, C/3/MAYBE, D/4/DONT-KNOW. The student would rotate the paper so their chosen answer was on top, then hold it up. A camera in the front of the room would detect in realtime and display the results. They even had an augmented reality smartphone app that would cover/highlight the students and their responses.

Oh, and the QR codes were per student, so answers could be tracked.



This sounds like so much of a physical struggle that doesn't scale very well.


I'm not sure what scale you mean. The demo I saw involved 100+ students in a crowded low-income rural Indian classroom with one teacher. The qrcodes were printed on regular paper on an inkjet printer. The image recognition software ran entirely on a cheap desktop with a webcam. The whole thing was designed for that type of environment.

I doubt it will be used much -- teachers who care seemed to be in even shorter supply than the minimal tech needed to run this -- but the guys at MSR that created it had put an surprising amount of work into making the image recognition fast and efficient. They had a smartphone-only version too, but it had some limitations, if I recall, because the processing power just wasn't quite there yet.


Teaching in general doesn't scale very well.


This sounds fantastic. Are you able to remember any hint of the name of the software?




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