Icon-Based Student Mood Tracker

This thumbs up/down/neutral check-in box acts as a barometer for a group’s collective mood.

Jeremy Cook
2 years agoDisplays

School can be challenging and can even be extremely difficult at times. While this can be considered a good thing up to a certain extent, at some point the benefits outweigh the stress effects. Since students can’t always communicate with their instructors, there’s not always a good feedback loop to keep things in check.

To get an overall picture of how a student body is feeling, Mónica Albornoz Anzola and Nihaarika Arora came up with an IoT mood tracker. This device works sort of like punching a timecard for a job; however, instead of literally punching a card (or scanning a badge), passersby hit a physical thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumb level icon to represent their general mood.

Inside of the system’s box structure, an Arduino Uno-style Adafruit Metro board is implemented with an ultrasonic sensor. This lights up an LED strip when someone approaches, inviting a quick mood review.

An Adafruit Feather Huzzah ESP8266 circuit receives button presses from the thumb icons, and controls a series of NeoPixels under each icon to indicate presses. Presses are relayed to Adafruit IO for tracking, and data can then be passed along to IFTTT in order to send an alert to faculty if the perceived student mood hits a certain set points.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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