As part of a small educational app, I’d like to add the functionality of randomizing turn-taking, particularly among study groups online in breakout rooms as with Zoom or Teams. Groups will have anywhere from 2 to 6 members so I thought it would be easy just to assign a number to each student then have them hit a button. It’s their turn to speak [this is ESL] when their number comes up.
Since group size is variable I’m struggling with how to do this in an elegant way. The best I’ve come up with is a screen with 5 buttons numbered from 2 to 6. If their group has 5, someone hits BUTTON 5 and up pops a number corresponding to one of the members. Though this seems workable it looks kind of ugly.
My skills are kind of limited but I think I can figure out a way to have students input the number of members and have the randomizer choose from among the resulting range. My worry is that, since students have to navigate to other screens each turn, they’ll have to input the total group size each time. This seems like a hassle that I’d like to avoid.
Another option would be to have students input their names and then have the randomizer return a name instead of a number. This is ideal from many perspectives but there are a couple things I don’t like about this approach. First of all, inputting the names could end up wasting a lot of valuable classroom time. Secondly, if I understand Adalo correctly, this would require an external database, something I’d like to avoid.
Anyone have any thoughts on achieving random group participation in a more elegant way?
You have list of Groups and when you click a group then there is a button that has to show a student that has to speak. Correct?
Based on my knowledge you can do this with giving a ID for each student in the Users collection and adding a button and a property in the Groups collection and a list that filtered by the property to show the user.
The other way is with the Random Picker and added the Random Picker value to the Groups collection property and add a text component and show the property.
Thanx for doing that Dilon. Yeah, it’s sort of what I had in mind but how do I deal with groups of only 3 or 4 students? This is where I’m stuck. Students won’t be signed in or registered. This is what I’m working on right now, a stack of randomizers:
So when someone hits a button it returns something like “Student B, it’s your turn!” They would be asked to count up A-B-C and so on at the beginning of the session.
It’s not the most elegant solution to be sure. It could be done with math but it seems like this screen would “forget” the number of students each time they move to a different screen. Maybe I misunderstand that though…
Still trying to think my way through this. I guess it would be possible to have students add group members as USERS then select from among those users, displaying their USER NAME on a random basis.
What I’m wondering is, would it be possible to have the USER database cleared upon closing the app? Group participants are likely to be different each time so there’s no point saving members from each session.
Perfect! Dilon… except the “Two” button would only return Student A or Student B; the “Three” button would choose from among Students A, B or C; “Four” >>> A,B, C or D and so on. This would certainly work for what I have in mind. Thanks for doing that, it’s really appreciated.
Thanks again, Dilon. Interesting approach. I’ll play with this a bit to see if I can get it to work for my purposes. I suppose I could have like a 1 hour countdown so that when students return to class the next day the list of members has been cleared.
I’m a little disappointed with Adalo’s limitations around timers, sounds and lack of javascript [of course it’s no-code!] support but I think it’s good enough for my purposes.
