A quiz management system based on P2P near-field communication on Android platform for smart class environments

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a set of very short range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of few centimetres to initiate connection. NFC allows sharing or exchange small payloads of data between two powered devices in a peer-to-peer fashion within pervasive computing and the Internet of Things environments. The NFC-based applications in the educational domain are still below their real potential, and the use of NFC technology in the context of a university ambient needs to be explored. The main objective of this research is to implement a working solution based on software and hardware components to automate the process of performing quizzes, relying on NFC-enabled Android smartphones. A Quiz Management System (QMS) is built using Android's client and server apps. The server app is under the control of the instructor, who can browse results of performing the quizzes with calculated scores on the smartphone. In addition to the experimental evaluation based on the built prototype, a questionnaire has been designed and the results of the simulated-class experiment as well as the feedback from the questionnaire indicated more than 80% of the respondents at least agreed with the choice of platform technology and QMS features.