This is a somewhat experimental attempt to create an open source client program for the iClicker system for classroom polling.
FreePoll exists because I wanted an open source program that I could use to run clicker quizzes from a Linux system.
If you're interested in trying out FreePoll, first compile it, then you can refer to the Guide for details on how to use it.
On Linux, FreePoll is reasonably robust and stable. Please do let me know if you run into any bugs, though.
A small amount of progress towards allowing FreePoll to work on Windows has been made, but it's not functional yet.
If you use Peer Instruction in your teaching, and you either run Linux or prefer to use open source software, FreePoll might be useful to you. See the Why section for some more background.
FreePoll currently only works fully on Linux, and has only been tested on Ubuntu 22.04.
On Linux, you will need
- g++
- make
- the libusb/hidapi development package
- the wxWidgets GTK3 development package
On Debian or Ubuntu:
sudo apt install g++ make libhidapi-dev libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev
To compile the program:
make depend
make -j
(The -j option is just so make uses all of your CPU cores.)
Two executables will be built.
The freepoll-gui executable is probably the one you want to use.
The Guide explains how to configure and use this program.
The freepoll executable is a very simple command line utility that
runs a poll and writes the results to a CSV file. You wil need
to use control-C to end the poll. (The functionality of this program
is modeled on iclickerpoll.)
A very preliminary effort to get FreePoll working on Windows has been started. Note that FreePoll doesn't actually work on Windows yet. (Help making this happen would be appreciated!)
You need MSYS2: https://www.msys2.org/
Install the compiler tools:
pacman -S --needed base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
Install wxWidgets and the hidapi libraries:
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-wxWidgets
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-hidapi
Compile the code:
make depend
make -j
The basic premise of clickers is pretty simple. You show students a multiple choice quiz question, let them think about the question, and answer individually by pressing one of the buttons (A through E) on their clickers. After the individual response, students discuss the question in small peer groups, and then answer again. Clickers are simply a way for the instructor to record student responses.
The iClicker hardware is quite nice. The student remotes are reasonably inexpensive and fairly robust. The base station connects to a computer using USB, and allows the student responses to be recorded.
The problem is the iClicker software. I have two main complaints.
First, Linux is no longer a supported operating system. In theory, the iClicker Classic software works on Linux. In practice, it doesn't run on any recent version of Linux (at least in my experience.)
Second, the modern iClicker Cloud software (which does not run on Linux systems at all) only supports storing the collected data remotely (in the "cloud"). So, the instructor must create an account to use it. Amazingly, the data available for download does not actually contain the student responses! At best, you can see who participated, and if you've indicated which are the correct answers, you can find out who answered the question correctly. But you can't actually find out which specific choices the students made in their responses! (I am trying to avoid going into an extended rant about how frustrating this is. Suffice it to say that I think this is a ridiculous limitation.)
So, what I want is a portable, open source client program that gives me full access to the students' responses. This is what FreePoll is intended to be.
Jason Siefken already did the hard part, which is reverse-engineering enough of the USB protocol that the iClicker base station uses to talk to the host PC to allow polls to be run and responses collected. He created iclickerpoll, which is a command line program written in Python which allows a single poll to be run and the responses written to a CSV file.
My contribution was translating Jason's work to C++, and then writing a simple GUI for running polls. The GUI is implemented using wxWidgets. Note that it's only been tested on Linux using wxGTK.
The iClicker base station appears as a Human Interface Device (HID), which is probably the easiest kind of USB device to communicate with. FreePoll uses libusb/hidapi to talk to the base station, using the same approach as iclickerpoll.
Only alphabetic (choices A–E) polls are supported.
FreePoll is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. See the LICENSE for details.
FreePoll includes code derived from iclickerpoll. It also uses rapidcsv to read CSV files, and argparse to parse command line arguments.
If you're interested in helping out, or have feedback, you can contact me at mailto:david.hovemeyer@gmail.com.