UniClick

Inspiration

Anyone who has ever given a presentation has appreciated the benefits of a clicker to seamlessly switch between slides. The added functionality of a touchpad and keyboard lets you remotely access your computer to play videos or search. That said ,the current applications that provide interactions via a mobile phone have a fixed number of keys and layouts. Moreover a clicker application designed for presentation can't be used for playing a game. So it is important to have dynamically generated keys on a universal clicker app.

What it does

UniClick is web app that permits the user to remotely control a computer from a smartphone. Developer community can design their custom keyboard layout for a specific applications by specifying a keyboard schema. A user can then choose from the supported applications to get the required layout. Also, since multiple users can control an application, UniClick provides an alernative to gaming consoles.

On top of this, UniClick also enables interaction with the audience. The presenter can create questionnaires that will be sent during the presentation. Audience members using the web app can then respond to yes/no, multiple choice or short-answer questions which will be fed back to the presenter's phone. These types of interactions are proven to provide a more accurate and complete overview of student understanding for teachers.

UniClick represents a unification of both clicker and survey functionality in one app.

How we built it

UniClick is built using Meteor for the front-end web interface, CouchBase for the database, DropWizard for the backend and Android Studio for the Android app. Java.Robot enables the remote-control functionality.

Challenges we ran into

Enabling the remote-connection from a phone took a lot of time and caused many headaches. Creating the app so that it could send the appropriate commands was also challenging. Connectivity between two servers was also a problem.