HandsUp: An In-Class Question Posing Tool

Asking questions in class in front of peers can be intimidating for many students. However, receiving timely answers to questions can help students better understand subsequent material. Moreover, prior work has shown that students learn more effectively in interactive classroom environments that promote instructional practices such as question posing. This paper describes a web-based platform, HandsUp, that addresses the underlying factors preventing students from asking questions in lectures. Using this tool, students can ask questions of their instructor while remaining anonymous to their peers, and instructors can choose to answer the questions that are of interest to the most students. We find that students can interact with the tool easily, and we present a short case study of its use in a large first-year programming course.