Nowadays, student-teacher interactions are a major factor to effective learning. However, classes with many students could lead to lack of such interactions. Moreover, quizzes and questionnaires may take a long time and are troublesome to collect and grade. In addition, when the teacher makes a field trip, students are scattered over the area, giving them difficulty to communicate. Although mobile phones could help, using them are costly and there are places where signal is unavailable.
Therefore, we have developed a system that helps doing those activities easier by using Bluetooth technology which is short range wireless connection. The system consists of a server program operating on a PC, and a client program running on mobile phones. The server initiates data transfer to the nearby clients, which, in turn, relay the data to other phones. We believe that this system will help increase efficiency and effectiveness in learning and bring new experience to students.
We set up an experiment consisting of six mobile phones to simulate a relatively small classroom environment. The data were successfully received on all of the phones. However, the overall transfer time seems to need further improvement as it is still rather high.
Finally, this system was designed to be flexible enough for other developers to add more functionality and adapt it for different applications.