Ask Slashdot: Setting Up Wireless Voting For Students? 167
RabidRabbit23 writes "I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students. We need a quick and low cost way to record votes done by the students in large committees. There will be two or three committees with about 200 students in each. We need to be able to record yes, no or abstention votes and must be able to identify each student's vote. We looked into radio response clickers, but it is very expensive to buy 400-600 of them. They cost about $40 at university bookstores, which is way out of our budget, but we don't know what kind of discount we could get by buying directly from the manufacturer. We do have wireless internet but we do not have enough bandwidth to support everyone using a laptop. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for a better way to record the students' votes?"
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Why not just use paper??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vote by SMS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then make your programming class code the back-end system for a computer.
Letting the programming class count all the votes might be just as good as letting the programming class cast all the votes.
"We need" (Score:3, Insightful)
No you don't. You want. I did Model UN in High School-- at some of the larger conferences too. We survived without electronic voting. Focus on the politics. If you have money (or time to search for a free one) to throw away hire a professional diplomat to come in and give a talk. I *still* remember and occasionally talk about such speeches that I heard in High School. That will be far far more valuable to your students than an electronic voting solution that is likely to break at some point, waste a lot of time while you're trying to fix it, then force you to go with paper anyway.