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workers, students, professionals and roam-in
business travellers. WiFi users can stay connected in
popular shopping malls, restaurant outlets or fast
food chains. In collaboration with The University of
Hong Kong, Y5ZONE has agreed to provide free
WiFi service to the university staff and students at
their WiFi hotspots throughout Hong Kong. So
university students and staff can have free WiFi
service with any WiFi enabled devices at Y5ZONE
WiFi hotspots. In return, Y5ZONE WiFi customers
will have free WiFi service at the University of
Hong Kong. PCCW is also a WiFi access provider in
Hong Kong and has built more than 3,000 WiFi
hotspots throughout Hong Kong, including
entertainment and leisure stores, coffee shops, fast
food chains, the airport, restaurants, shopping malls
and MTR stations (PCCW website, 2008). In
collaboration with The University of Hong Kong,
PCCW has also agreed to provide WiFi access to the
university staff and students at their WiFi hotspots.
All these are providing a very good background for
wireless applications. With all these WiFi
infrastructures being made in placed, students in
Hong Kong basically will have free access to the
internet anywhere via WiFi hotspots using their
WiFi-enabled devices. As a result, following the
concept and design of the interactive m-learning
game “wisdom”, an “Interactive Wireless Mobile
Learning System” is developed to facilitate large
class-room teaching and assessment.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
The problems of large class-room teaching and
advantages of using m-learning in large class-room
teaching are discussed in section 2. The challenges
of designing m-learning tools for handsets are
described in section 3. The system descriptions and
architectures of the interactive m-learning game,
Wisdom, are described in section 4. The system
descriptions and architectures, together with the
useful features for large class-room teaching, of the
interactive m-learning tool, are given in section 5.
Section 6 is Conclusions.
2 ADVANTAGES OF PROPOSED
m-LEARNING TOOL IN LARGE
CLASSES
In the old days, lectures and tutorials were given to
only small classes of students and there was strong
interaction between teachers and students.
Nowadays, we have large lecture theatres which can
accommodate hundreds of students. In teaching or
lecturing such large classes, there is always a lack of
student exchange, interaction and feedback. Studies
have shown that the failures of the first year students
in Electrical Engineering were linked to an almost
complete absence of feedback on progress during the
first term of study (Entwistle, 1989). However, it is
not easy for teachers to know how much the students
have learned and what the students’ level of
understanding are during large-class teaching. Is the
teaching pace too slow or too fast? Are the materials
too difficult for the students to understand? How
much of the materials that the students have
understood? Do the students feel easy about the
lectures, etc? To find out the answers for all these
questions, the teachers will have to ask students
some quiz questions related to the materials taught in
the class and analyse the answers from the students.
In Hong Kong (probably in some other countries as
well), students somehow tend to be a little bit shy
and are afraid of being looked stupid or ignorant.
They are reluctant to answer questions to the
teachers directly in a large class. Thus asking
students quiz questions in a class may not always
work. Another possible method to assess the students
learning performance during large class teaching is
to spend some of the teaching time to perform a
written test/quiz. The problem with this method is
that it will unavoidably distract the teachers’
concentration and students’ attention. Moreover,
after the written test/quiz, the teachers will have to
devote a lot of time to mark and analyse the answers.
In a large class, this will create much more workload
for the already extremely busy teachers. The results
obtained are not interactive. The teachers know the
results after marking the test/quiz and analysing the
results, so they can only take appropriate actions
such as repeating the chapters or topics in the next
class which may be a week, a month or even longer
later. When repeating, the teachers will also have to
spend some time to refresh the students’ minds on
these chapters and topics, significantly slowing
down the teaching progress.
The m-learning tool proposed here can help
teachers to perform simple tests/quizzes during large
class-room teaching and assess the students’
performances immediately after the tests/quizzes in a
convenient way. Thus teachers can use the tool to
closely monitor the learning progress of the students
in the class, indentify any possible problems
encountered if occur, and take appropriate actions
needed. For example, if it is found that some topics
or concepts, etc, which are misunderstood by many
students in the class, the teacher can give further
detailed explanations on them immediately to make
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