
Show HN: piCards- Computer vision based audience polling solution for classrooms - AbhinavDAIICT
We have created a computer vision and smartphone based audience polling solution that promises all the benefits of clicker devices at minimal cost and that too without the students requiring any electronic devices.<p>Use of continuous feedback systems like clicker devices is proven to improve learning outcomes in classrooms and such devices are widely used in Universities. BUT such devices are costly and hence cannot be used in mid-low income setups. Also, carrying devices in bulk is a problem.<p>In our solution, we replace the clicker devices with normal sheets of paper with QR Code like patterns printed on them(We call the sheet — piCard). The four orientations of the sheet translate to options A, B, C and D. Each student gets one such sheet. The teacher asks a question and students rotate and lift up their sheets and show it to the teacher who has our scanning app running in his&#x2F;her smartphone. The app scans all the sheets at once. Yes, you heard it right — at once! Whatever is visible in the single camera frame, gets scanned at once. The teacher gets to see the responses instantly with counts of correct and incorrect responses. These responses are synced to our analytics platform where we perform question, class, quiz, subject and student level analysis to track each individual student’s performance over time and clearly find out their strong and weak areas.<p>Here is a blog post related to it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;22bate7&#x2F;picards-hello-world-3a2da6f7b885" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;22bate7&#x2F;picards-hello-world-3a2da6f7b885</a>
======
Animats
_These responses are synced to our analytics platform where we perform
question, class, quiz, subject and student level analysis to track each
individual student’s performance over time and clearly find out their strong
and weak areas._

Another startup that builds dossiers on kids.

------
SSilver2k2
Very cool! I work in Education (Higher Ed) but I've seen K-12 use this app
before: [https://www.plickers.com/](https://www.plickers.com/) which kinda
offers the same functionality.

I LOVE seeing these kinds of apps come from low tech solutions combined with
small bits of high tech!

Great job, and I hope you run with it.

~~~
AbhinavDAIICT
Thanks :) Yes, Plickers also works the same way and is really awesome but for
now lacks anonymous polling which I'm sure they must be working on.

~~~
bnj
Can you expand on this? I looked at the blog post and as far as I can tell
piCards operate the same way as plickers. In my use of Plickers, I can either
choose to give each student a specific card for personalized polling, but I
can also just not identify the student with each card which allows for
anonymous polling.

What have I missed here?

~~~
AbhinavDAIICT
In plickers, you still get to see responses on the cards and since you know
the students in most cases, you can identify and if you want to single out a
student (which I'm sure most teachers don't do), you can do it. "piCards:
Anonymous Polling App" is a truly anonymous feedback system where you cannot
know the students' response unless you read their cards. This will also give
more confidence to students to freely answer without worrying about getting it
right.

------
nil1511
Here is it in action:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ5Cu7rEs_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ5Cu7rEs_Q)

------
tw1010
Just curious, was this based on Gwerns tweet?

~~~
nil1511
I am unaware of any such tweet. Can you please direct me to that?

~~~
gwern
A tweet from 2016 or so referencing a longer writeup I made:
[https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#proposal-hand-
counti...](https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#proposal-hand-counting-
mobile-app-for-more-fluid-group-discussions) My idea was that CNNs were good
enough that you didn't have to use hacks like QR-codes or specially-designed
papers; I think that someone has already done something equivalent, unless I'm
thinking of you guys! (Even if you did go to CNNs for pure hand-counting, it's
an obvious enough idea I doubt you got it from me, and in any case, it's
implementation that counts.)

------
pmontra
Good job. Is the code available?

~~~
AbhinavDAIICT
Nope. We'll open source parts of it but that'll take time.

------
Akshay_173
Awesome Idea Great job

------
neo73
great!

------
vivekkakashi
Nice

