Socrate - a "Socratic Method" callout generator
Copyright © 2011 Bart Massey


Socrate is a "Socratic Method" teaching tool. It presents a
very simple GUI for picking "callouts" from a student
list. During class, the "Call" button is used to select a
student to call on. The student is picked weighted-randomly,
such that a student who has been called upon relatively more
over time is relatively less likely to be called
next. Further, the tool will not call on a student again in
the same session until all students have been called on in
that session. Once a student has been called, the tool
provides buttons for the instructor to record the response:
"Absent", "D/K" (Didn't Know, chosen as something gentle and
noncommittal), and "OK".

Socrate is written in Python, and available as open source
under the MIT license.

To use the tool, first prepare a CSV state file called
socrate.txt containing lines of the form

  index,last,first,0,0,0

The index should be some kind of student index: I use the
index number from our student records. Don't use a private
number like an SSN as it is displayed in the tool. The
numbers in the line are the number of times the student was
called, number of times the student was absent when called,
and number of times the student failed to answer
successfully when called. This file can be imported into a
spreadsheet or edited directly (obviously).

By default, the tool will use "socrate.txt" as the
statefile, and will log all events to
"socrate-log.txt". Both of these files can be changed via
command-line arguments.