Foster teacher-student interaction in the classroom and active learning through instant polling within the framework of drawing courses

With the advent of new mobile technologies, the mechanisms for student access to institutional and educational information have radically changed. The intensive use of instant polling emerges as a new paradigm for real-time teacher-student interaction in the classroom to make the lesson more participatory through an instant communication style closer to Gen Z. The experience relates to the Building Engineering degree program at the Politecnico di Torino, specifically in the first-year Building Drawing course. The methodological approach adopted explores the potential of audience response systems to stimulate the student’s active participation in the course, both for theoretical and practical lessons. In particular, a series of activities are promoted with several educational purposes: (i) active reflective tasks to stimulate students’ interest concerning the topic; (ii) conceptualization to facilitate memorization and stimulation of the ability to synthesize; (iii) formative learning assessment testing; (iv) self-assessment in the final deliverables; (v) peer evaluation of practical group exercises. Through the integration of digital interaction into presence-based teaching in the course, it has been noticed an increasing active involvement of students compared to previous years. The use of cross-cutting tools such as Mentimeter, Padlet and Google Form has effectively supported the experimentation in the classroom, giving back real-time feedback from students and a preliminary overview of the individually acquired knowledge. Moreover, greater confidence about the topics is observed thanks to the concurrent training of soft skills ranging from the discipline taught to the technical-social discussion.