Try, try, try again... success!

Bluetooth and I have had a troubled start. I was able to use built in Bluetooth services for my phone and PC but ran into some problems when I tried to use the Bluetooth serial port communication between two computers.  My hope was to establish a client server communication between two devices much like a student might connect to a on campus service with there cell phone.  I have great optimism that Bluetooth may be the most affordable and most common communication transport for community college students.

Perseverance prevails...

Despite this optimism, the last couple of weeks was making my re-evaluate my Bluetooth goals to the point where I was starting to believe the best thing to do was to leave Bluetooth to a later date and work on some other loose ends with my sabbatical.  but..... I am a stubborn person and my vanity got the best of me and I spend one more morning looking for the "Rosetta Stone" that would provide the missing link in my writing a Bluetooth server in either Visual Basic, Java, C# or PYTHON.  Fortunately, the answer was found and it was a Visual Basic solution (which is the language I am most productive with). The other good news about VB was that I could write my own client device for my PDA to act as the client to communicate with my Bluetooth server.

Classroom Clickers Revised

The one Bluetooth app which seemed to make a lot of sense what the classroom clicker.  Many publishers and content providers have been selling faculty on the benefits of real time class room surveys via class room clickers. Little devices given to each student to capture their understanding of class concepts via games or one minute surveys.  These tools have

 merit but they do cost $ and they get lost, and they have to be handed out and collected..

 What if the student could run a small voting app from their mobile device and send their responses to a Bluetooth server in the front of the room. Bluetooth provides the communication link in this simple client server application. 

I was able to create a BT server (my laptop) and client (my PDA) and create a BT Clicker application.  Screen shots are below and more information on the design can be found on my

 Sabbatical portal (click here). 

BT Server Main Screen 

This screens shows the result of two students sending a response to a question asked by the instructor.

This screen sits on the instructors laptop and displays a running total of student votes. The counters can be reset for other questions to be asked.  

Student BT PDA Clicker 

The student sees something a little different.  I have screen shots of the survey running from a PDA and what would like like from a Smartphone.  What I have created so far only runs on mobile devices with Microsoft Mobile 5.0 or SmartPhone 5.0. The SmartPhone has not been fully tested since the Microsoft Device Emulator software can not emulate Bluetooth and serial communication to another device at the same

 time.  I would need a MS SmartPhone to finish final development and testing. 

BT SmartPhone

The rest of the week is testing...testing...testing....  Trying not to leave a stone unturned.  

Happy Thanksgiving everyone....