Clickers in the ’60s at a TYC?
At an AAPT conference years ago, a person noticed my badge, exclaiming "I always wanted to work at Foothill College!" They told me that in the 1960s, Foothill had a lecture hall where students as a class could give immediate feedback to their instructors via buttons at their seats, a forerunner to modern clicker systems. Intrigued, I later did a quick Google search and discovered that Foothill had an EDEX system in a 240-person lecture hall, which featured multiple-choice buttons at each seat that were networked to a computer at the instructor's section. This fact got tucked away, and I didn't think about it again until a recent hiring interview when a candidate from an R1 commented how TYCs were at the forefront of innovations in teaching. I remembered the EDEX system, and it reignited my curiosity.
Authors
- David Marasco (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2472-3700)
Institutions
- Foothill College (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- The Physics Teacher
- Published
- 2025-01-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0244897
- Primary Topic
- Innovative Teaching Methods
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00