Innovative Applications of Classroom Response Devices in Manufacturing Education

Classroom response devices (clickers) are now extensively used in all types of courses. The authors have introduced clickers into undergraduate manufacturing courses. Due to the fastpaced nature of manufacturing courses today, content that formerly spanned up to four courses is combined into a single course. This consolidation made student involvement more difficult as the amount of information covered in the course has greatly increased. Course consolidation is also found to encourage traditional lecture-based approaches and rote learning. The use of clickers encourages a more active learning environment where student engagement is increased and where the instructor may immediately evaluate the comprehension of specific concepts in real-time and immediately discuss any misconceptions which are discovered with the class resulting in an ideal formative assessment tool. This technical paper reports the findings collected from various manufacturing technology courses which intensively used clickers as an assessment tool.