Solving the Participation Pickle with Pick.al

One of my biggest ongoing teaching challenges is keeping students engaged during lectures.

Sure, there are ways to add interactivity here and there, but sometimes there’s just no way around an old-fashioned lecture.

There are a few ways of dealing with this, and I haven’t been satisfied with any.

1. It’s their grade, if they zone out that’s on them. In terms of the incentives, sure, the externalities are all internalized. But as a macroeconomist, I also know: if time-inconsistency problems are hard for policymakers, how much more for students! We shouldn’t be surprised when students do poorly if the main feedback they get from paying attention or not comes a week later with the homework grade.
2. Posing questions and waiting for answers. Either you get a minute of awkward silence, or you get the same two engaged students answering everything while everyone else keeps zoning out.
3. Cold calling. I started doing this a few years into teaching. The advantage is that it keeps students on their toes and paying attention. But a few problems left me unsatisfied:
   1. “How about you in the red shirt”. Hard to catch a student’s attention that way, and in a class of 40 or more, learning names takes a good chunk of the semester.
   2. I had no systematic way of keeping track of participation. Every semester I’d look at the roster and still have a few names I couldn’t put a face to.
   3. Humans are really bad at making random choices! Much as I tried, I couldn’t guarantee I wasn’t biased toward or against (say) the corners of the room, or students whose names I knew.
4. LMS software. These can offer a lot of great student participation tools. But students have to pay for them – which isn’t worth it if you’re just looking for one feature. On top of that, then you’re locked into an ecosystem.

So, I made an app myself. It does one thing and does it well.

Pick.al (pronounced Pickle) picks students at random from a roster and keeps track of participation points. I can now pose a question in class, ask “what do you think…”, pull out my phone and hit a button, and have a name.

I can also record the quality of their answers:

• ✓: 1 point, good attempt! (Since this is for participation points, I record ✓ whether right or wrong, as long as they give it a good shot)
• ?: 0.5 points, if they ask “wait, what was the question?”
• ×: 0 points, if they’re not there or don’t respond at all.

There’s also a 1-5 scale option, for those who want a more fine-grained evaluation.

This has a lot of benefits in the classroom:

• Since I can call on students by name, I learn names more quickly.
• Pick.al chooses randomly from the pool of students who have been called on the least so far. So, I know my participation points are as fair as possible.
• Students know they can get called on at any time, so they pay attention more in class, and then do better on the homeworks and tests.
• Students appreciate being brought in more frequently. One noted on the evaluations the first semester I piloted it: “something specific I like is he got the class involved by calling people out which forced them to test their knowledge which is something teachers need to do more of.”

Using Pick.al is as simple as registering (with an email address or an OrcID), uploading a roster, and then hitting a button during class. You can also swipe through the history and edit or undo participation events, and go back in the admin interface and add, edit, and remove participation events after the fact if necessary.

Pick.al is secure and password-protected, and has a number of handy features:

• You can set excused absences if a student lets you know beforehand, so their name doesn’t come up until a certain date.
• You can select specific students from the roster in a sidebar, if you want to give credit to – say – a student who raises his hand unbidden.
• If you’d like to use the classroom computer instead of pulling out a phone, you can use it with full keyboard navigation.
• Scores can be downloaded as a CSV to be put in your own gradebook.
• Private notes can be added to students to show up when their names are selected, e.g. “sits in the back corner”

If you use it and find a bug or have an idea that would make it more useful to you, feel free to let me know. It’s been a great tool in my own classes, and I hope it’ll be useful for other teachers to keep students engaged too.