Student Location Defining Scenario towards Active Class Participation Enhancement

Teachers or instructors generally practice cold calling in class to engage students in learning activities more actively. As an alternative to random cold calls, certain systems can be built to select candidates based on their interests. Therefore each student is represented by their own profile. By linking these interests to the topic or issue being discussed, student's role is changed from being a passive recipient to a source of information that may enrich the discussion. Based on the level of relevance, students are expected to contribute and enrich the discussion by sharing their opinions, comments or experiences. This paper focuses on how technically this scenario can be realized by generating a classroom virtual grid that will map every student's predefined position, including those who are seated outside of the PTZ camera's range, to its corresponding coordinate. In general, the results obtained indicate that any valid seating position can be associated with the faces of students who occupy that seat. However, the application fails to detect any faces which are mostly blocked by the presence of other students.