Using an electronic voting system in logic lectures: one practitioner's application

Abstract This paper reports the introduction of electronic handsets, like those used on the television show ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ into the teaching of philosophical logic. Logic lectures can provide quite a formidable challenge for many students, occasionally to the point of making them ill. Our rationale for introducing handsets was threefold: (i) to get the students thinking and talking about the subject in a public environment; (ii) to make them feel secure enough to answer questions in the lectures because the system enabled them to do this anonymously; and (iii) to build their confidence about their learning by their being able to see how they were progressing in relation to the rest of the students in the class. We have achieved all of these and more. Our experience has revealed that the use of handsets encourages a more dynamic form of student interaction in an environment – the lecture – that can, in the wrong hands, be utterly enervating, but they also provide an opportunity for the lecturer to respond to students' difficulties at the time when they really matter. In this paper, we discuss our case of rapid adoption, our grounds for judging it a success, and what that success seems to have depended on.