Have you heard of “Hug An Inventor Day?”
No?
Well, that’s probably because it doesn’t exist.
But it should.
If I could hug an inventor, it would be the person who came up with this handy-dandy contraption…
Three guesses as what this thing is.
Here’s a clue…
The machine is a Scantron, and it’s used for counting the number of correct exam answers that students bubble in on forms similar to the one above.
I’d never used the machine before, but after a teacher suggested that I use the forms to make grading easier, I tweaked my exam and…well…VOILA!
I had no clue how to check my exams, but the wonderful media specialist at my school walked me through the steps.
The first thing that caught my attention was the sound.
Do y’all remember the days of dot matrix printers? Remember the sounds they made as the cartridges made their way back and forth across the papers?
That, my friends, is what a Scantron sounds like as the forms get sucked across the scanner.
For a techie like me, it was music to my ears.
I was in love.
I googled for who invented the machine, and Cha Cha (the know-it-all for random bits of knowledge) claims that the Scantron began as a subsidiary of John Harland, a company based in California.
Still, I think someone deserves a hug for making teachers’ lives easier.
If I have a one complaint (you’ve gotta take the good with the bad, don’t you know), it’s that the machine doesn’t come with a short response answer checker.
THAT would have deserved a kiss too!
Filed under: Teaching | Tagged: Scantron, teaching | Leave a comment »
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