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A project more than 20 years old

An idea for teaching driving theory

Driving school classroom: a theory test question projected on the screen and students answering on paper

At a time when, in Portugal, the methods for teaching driving theory were still underdeveloped, I came up with this idea — one that today would surely be solved far more easily.

But what matters is to place ourselves in an era of scarce resources. Money was tight: driving schools could not afford a computer network, let alone one just to run a single piece of software.

STAR · Action

Action

I wrote my own software, a test generator. The hard part was still missing: getting each student’s answer — A, B or C — into the computer, without a computer network.

The solution was inside something every school already had: the keyboard. Each key sends the computer a different ASCII code. For 15 students with 3 possible answers I needed 45 codes — and a keyboard has more than 100 keys.

A keyboard outside and inside, with the controller board that sends ASCII codes to the computer

1. Open up the keyboard

Inside every keyboard there is a small board that reads the keys and sends their codes to the computer. From that board I ran 45 wires: 3 per student, one for each answer (A, B and C), each with its own ASCII code.

A mouse with its three buttons labelled A, B and C

2. Turn mice into keyboards

At the end of each wire was a mouse, modified so it was no longer a mouse: its three buttons became a tiny keyboard with only three keys — A, B and C — each with its own code.

Classroom with an A, B, C mouse on every desk and a question projected on the screen

3. Answer all at once

With a mouse on every desk, everyone answered at the same time. Each click reached the computer as if a key had been pressed, and my software knew who had answered and what.

Screen showing the test results: each student’s name, number of wrong answers and pass or fail

4. See the results straight away

At the end of each test, the results appeared on the screen straight away: who had passed, who had failed and how many wrong answers each student had. No sheets to collect, none to mark.

One keyboard, 15 mice and a bit of ingenuity: a whole classroom connected to one computer, with no network and little investment.

STAR · Result

Result

This idea paid off in several ways:

  • Lessons became more productive and more profitable.
  • Competitors started talking about the system.
  • The school gained around 50% more students.
  • A business plan was drawn up to sell the system to other schools.