Thanks for buying DreamPad, the nation's #1 interactive application to provide real-time instructor feedback during a class session. This user's guide is divided into the following sections: Installation, Start-up, In-class Use, After Class Use, and Troubleshooting.
Installation of DreamPad is easy.
DreamPad requires either Windows 3.1 or Win 95 running a WINSOCK TCP/IP protocol stack.
Basically any PC that is running a web browser like Netscape, will be running a WINSOCK stack. There are many popular shareware WINSOCK implementations available for download from the Internet. It will be necessary for you to download and install one of these packages prior to using DreamPad. (If you have Win 95, just install the TCP/IP protocol from the Control Panel.)
To install the DreamPad software itself, simply copy the file "cl2000s.exe" into a directory on the PC to be used by the instructor. Then copy the file"cl2000c.exe" onto each student workstation.
To start the DreamPad application, first start-up your WINSOCK TCP/IP software. Then run the appropriate program (student or instructor).
As the instructor program begins, you should get a notification box informing you that the winsock drivers were successful. Following this, you should receive notification that the server has started on port 2000. The Instructor application is now ready for use.
IMPORTANT: You may run only 1 instructor console on a single PC.
As the student program begins, you will get the following dialog box:
Enter the IP address of the instructor's workstation on the first line. If the instructor's IP address is not known, you can usually use your TCP/IP application to find it. Alternatively, you may be able to run "netstat" to get the IP address. The port number should not be changed from 2000 on the prototype. After pressing OK, the main student dialog box is displayed and the application is ready for use. You may run as many copies of the student program as you desire, even on a single PC.
IMPORTANT: You MUST have the correct IP address of the instructor's PC entered, even if it is on the same machine!
You may also run the instructor console and multiple student consoles all on the same PC.
The instructor dialog is operated solely by pointing and selecting. The basic control layout is shown below:
As the class progresses, you can observe questions being received by the Questions Pending count advancing. To view the questions, press the ? icon. The system will then display each question in a message box so the instructor can answer them. Pressing the OK button will display the next question in the queue.
To view the current mood of the class, press the mood icon (the icon with a gauge). The mood will be shown by both a gauge and a textual description. The possible moods vary from 1, really bored, to 10, really excited.
To view the current opinion on the current slide, you can observe the stoplight icon on the dialog. The color changes based upon student comprehension, along with a textual description to the right of the stoplight. To give you a quantitative idea of the number of students in each category, the numbers to the left of the stoplight will show the absolute number of votes in each category.
To save the current data and go to the next slide, press the Next Slide button.
To save the current data and go to the previous slide, press the Prev Slide button.
The student dialog provides the ability to ask anonymous questions, give feedback on a particular slide, and give a feeling for the mood of the class directly to the instructor in real time. The basic student dialog looks like:
To ask a question of the instructor, you can either:
To send a slide opinion, you can either:
To send an opinion on the mood of the class, you can either:
Besides real-time class monitoring, an important feature of Dream-Pad is its ability to "remember" what questions were asked and what the mood of the class was at any given period. When the instructor presses the Slide buttons, the current state of the class is appended to the appropriate file. Files are named "qq" followed by the slide number followed by ".txt". For example, the history of slide 1 is in file "qq1.txt" while slide 12 would be in "qq12.txt" .
The slide file is formatted with the slide number, then a list of the questions, followed by the total number of red, yellow, and green votes, followed by an indication of the overall mood of the class at the time the slide was changed.
If the instructor changes to a new slide or goes back to a previous slide, any additional information is appended to the existing file.
The most probable source of errors is from the winsock networking layer. The following are common errors you might observe:
KNOWN BUGS OR THINGS PUT OFF TILL THE PRODUCTION VERSION:
'R' (registration) type messages are not used in the prototype. A single student console can send in multiple votes on every slide. This is to enhance the testing/evaluation process.
The spin button on the question dialog that controls question number is not hooked up.
The question number is not used for anything. Each question received is queued against the active slide.
Send Comments about the great design or suggestions for improvements to Bob the Great Designer.
Send Complaints and Bug Reports to Bob the Stupid Programmer.