Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

Teaching with Clickers

What are clickers and how do they work?

Clickers are an interactive technology that enables instructors to pose questions to students and immediately collect and view the responses of the entire class. This is how clickers work:

  1. Instructors present multiple-choice questions (verbally or with presentation software or with the i>clicker software).
  2. Students click in their answers using remote transmitters, available at the bookstore (i>clicker, the system supported at Carnegie Mellon, uses radio frequency transmitters, which are more reliable than previous versions of this technology).
  3. The system instantly collects and tabulates the results, which instructors can view, save, and (if they wish) display anonymously for the entire class to see.

For help with clickers, contact us at eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu and a member of our team will be in touch.