Find: Teaching with Mobile

In class quizzing using phones. Good idea! 

Teaching with Mobile

Ever wish you could get your students to stop texting and start using their phones productively in the classroom? Do you ever wish for an easy and quick way to measure what your students have learned? If so, you’ll be excited to learn that we recently open-sourced our internal Quiz & Poll App for Android. Developed by our internal learning systems team, “Quiz & Poll” enables educators to engage and challenge their students inside the classroom (using polls) and outside the classroom (using quizzes).

How it works

With Quiz & Poll, teachers & educators can create quizzes and polls easily using Google Spreadsheets. Quizzes and Polls are distributed to students via the Android app or an embeddable webplayer. Statistics data is written back to the spreadsheet so the instructor can track student responses and understanding.

Key Features

Quizzes and polls are easily created and administered on Google Spreadsheets. 

Students can download the Android App to take the quiz or live classroom poll. 

For students without Android phones, quizzes and polls can be accessed via a web interface (works on laptops, iPhones, iPads etc.).

Administrators can view quiz and poll statistics on the same Spreadsheet.

The quizzing app and leaderboard

How it’s built

The Quiz & Poll application showcases how you can combine several Google technologies to make an easy to use app. The code is useful for developers curious about following technologies and how they interact:

• Android app communicating with backend on AppEngine (Python+Django)


• AppEngine backend is communicating with GData Spreadsheets API


• Google Apps Script (used for interface to administer polls)


• Closure Javascript framework ...