Challengr, a Classroom Response System for Competency Based Assessment and Real-Time Feedback with Micro-Contests

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents the Challengr tool, a modern Classroom Response System (CRS) used to organise micro-contests in classrooms, especially for higher education. The proposed tool is designed to evaluate students in a fun and challenging way. It also allows instructors to collect feedback about students' performances to adapt and improve their lessons and teaching. CRS is an interesting technology to increase students' motivation and introduce interactions in classrooms in a scalable way. Classical CRS like clickers can be used to implement active and cooperative learning, making students engaged actors of their own learning. The tool proposed in this paper is not meant to provide interaction during the lesson or collect real-time statistics with brief questions to the audience. The micro-contests can take place at the beginning of the lesson to check students' backgrounds or memories of the previous ones. At the end of the lesson, it can be used to probe what they understood. Finally, the system supports local challenges and online remote ones and can accept guests. It additionally offers an API to connect it to other tools, like Learning Management System (LMS). Challengr is suitable for computer science engineering courses, in particular when skills to be mastered by students are piecewise and incremental. This work-in-progress tool is planned to be tested for an introductory programming course. It is critical for instructors to follow up how students are assimilating the material from the lessons. It will also undergo a thorough evaluation measuring the impact on students' learning.