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would be to decrease the size of classes and get rid of
anonymous teaching events like mass lectures, such
that a more direct and personal contact could be es-
tablished both among students and between those and
the lecturer. This would naturally be the favourable
approach. But decreasing the size of classes would
imply to accept less students for higher education or
to employ more personnel. Society seems to agree
that the former is not desirable, still the latter - which
means more capital investment into education - has
always been difficult to convey.
Hence, given the situation that mass lectures ap-
pear to be a necessary phenomenon in today’s higher
education, one might go on to think about how to
overcome the aforementioned drawback while keep-
ing the lecture setting as it is. In an age of com-
puterisation, where electronic media and communi-
cation devices are ubiquitous, the idea for an ARS
like SMILE emerges. It envisions a scenario in which
all students are equipped with mobile computer de-
vices enabling them to interactively share their current
state of understanding among each other and with the
lecturer. Further applications to intersperse the peri-
ods of passive listening with more activating tasks are
thinkable.
Such approaches have been made (Kopf et al.,
2005) and taken up by group of first years Computing
Science students in December 2010 in a study project
involving the programming of smartphones. This was
the beginning of the SMILE project. In this position
paper we are sharing details from the process of de-
velopment, what questions we were facing and which
decisions we took (Section 2). We describe the func-
tionalities of our first SMILE prototype in Section
3 before giving initial reports about our experiences
from an ongoing field test of SMILE in a first year
Computing Science lecture with approx. 90 students
in Section 4. This field test includes a formative eval-
uation which was conceived and is carried through
in cooperation with learning psychologists. Section
4 includes descriptions about this evaluation as well
as first tendencies observable from preliminary eval-
uation results. Section 5 concludes the paper with a
summary and outlines our plans for future develop-
ments.
2 DEVELOPMENT
As described in Section 1, the desire for an electronic
ARS can emerge naturally from the everyday expe-
rience of students. In earlier times German students
knew how to anonymously utter their discontent with
the lecturer by loudly shuffling their feet under the
tables. This custom, however, has today mostly dissi-
pated. Anyway, one would wish for more elaborated
ways of giving the lecturer feedback, just as an open-
minded lecturer wishes to get constructive feedback
from his otherwise mostly anonymous audience.
The problem of sitting in a lecture and not know-
ing what the lecturer is talking about might be a prob-
lem more typical for mathematical and natural scien-
tific lectures than for the humanities, because in the
former it seems more likely that the lack of under-
standing of one concept drastically hampers the un-
derstanding of following concepts. This - and the fact
that Computing Sciences students and researchers are
said to be rather adventurous when it comes to the
application of new technologies - might have led to
one of the first academic electronic ARSs emerging
at a Computing Science faculty (Kopf et al., 2005).
The authors developed WIL/MA, which was the main
source of inspiration for SMILE. Kopf et al. evalu-
atied WIL/MA by splitting up a class for one semester
giving the same lecture to three groups: one without
the ARS and two with differently specified versions
of it. Although WIL/MA was well received by the
students, the exam results of the three groups did not
significantly differ, and eventually the project was dis-
continued.
In December 2010 a group of first year students
at our chair was given the opportunity to do a student
project as part of their syllabus in which they should
investigate the potentials of applying smartphones
and tablet computers in academic teaching. When
confronted with the idea of developing an ARS, the
group was quickly convinced that their learning expe-
rience would benefit from such a system. Thus, the
development began and the project was later named
SMILE for SMartphones In LEctures. As research
staff it was our priority to give the students as much
freedom as possible in their design decisions, because
we supposed that they were most likely to implement
SMILE in a way which would be acceptable from
a student’s perspective. Furthermore, it turned out
that the students’ enthusiasm and motivation was at
a maximum when they were able to follow their own
ideas and initiatives.
We were well aware that from an educational sci-
entific point of view we were merely repeating the
experiments of Kopf et al. But their work was done
seven years ago when PDAs or programmable cell-
phones were still a curiosity, whereas today almost
every student is equipped with a smartphone or tablet
computer. We thus decided to give the idea another
chance to prove itself.
To implement SMILE, we first needed a concept
for a client/server architecture. The SMILE server
SMILE-SMARTPHONESINLECTURES-InitiatingaSmartphone-basedAudienceResponseSystemasaStudent
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