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I'm looking for a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) student response system (like Socrative, Top Hat, Learning Catalytics, Pingo, etc.) with the following three properties:

  1. It is free for both the instructor and students.
  2. It can display mathematical formulas.
  3. Students register and sign in individually, so that it can be used to track attendance/participation or give graded quizzes.

Is there such a thing?

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3 Answers 3

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The program geddit might be what you are searching for.

Regarding your requirements

  1. It is free for both the instructor and students.
    • Yes
  2. It can display mathematical formulas.
    • It can show arbitrary images, so this is partly covered.
  3. Students register and sign in individually, so that it can be used to track attendance/participation or give graded quizzes.
    • Yes
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  • $\begingroup$ Nice answer, good-looking program :) $\endgroup$
    – Tutor
    Jun 17, 2014 at 5:27
  • $\begingroup$ This looks quite good! I need to experiment with it some more, but at first glance it even has a formula editor if you click on "Math question", so it may not be necessary to recourse to images. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Shulman
    Jun 17, 2014 at 7:33
  • $\begingroup$ For anyone else reading this, there is indeed a basic formula editor, but apparently only one formula is allowed per question. So if you need multiple formulas per question, or more complicated formulas, then images are I guess the way to go. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Shulman
    Aug 28, 2014 at 19:10
  • $\begingroup$ Also, Geddit is only free-as-in-beer, which is good enough for now, but eventually someone ought to write one that's free-as-in-freedom. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Shulman
    Aug 28, 2014 at 19:20
  • $\begingroup$ This app is no longer available, and the link above doesn't really lead anywhere. (source: educatorstechnology.com/2015/05/…) $\endgroup$
    – David Steinberg
    May 28, 2019 at 18:33
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I think the answer right now is "no". I've either played with or actually used all (I think) of the currently-available CMS's and many of them have two out of the three features you used -- e.g. Learning Catalytics does well with math and handles individual students, but isn't free -- but not all three, not yet anyway.

By the way, I would love to see the open source community tackle this as a project.

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  • $\begingroup$ What a bummer! But thanks. How about (1)+(3) only, is there one of those? I might be able to get by with projecting the questions and answers at the front of the room. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Shulman
    May 24, 2014 at 3:27
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Moodle is free (open source), it can be coerced to use MathJax, and can give quizzes.

We use it here, but personally just as a way to communicating with the students and collecting homework. I haven't used its features for reporting grades back, nor have I looked at its facilities for giving automated quizzes.

I'm sure that the work involved in creating a database of questions and answers by topic, all more or less equally dificult, will be formidable. Unless it is a really massive class, repeated more or less the same each year (also with lots of help comming up with problems, checking them, and entering them into the system) it's not worth it. Then again, the larger the class, the larger the required database of questions so there aren't too many repeats...

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    $\begingroup$ I think that Mike is asking for a clicker-like system where students answer questions on a phone during a lecture. I don't think that Moodle does anything like that (but I haven't looked properly at Moodle for several years, so I could be wrong). $\endgroup$
    – Neil Strickland
    May 22, 2014 at 18:57

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