MAYA v3.0

MAYA is an online, open source audience response system (ARS) and learning tool optimized for the iPhone and iPad. It allows presenters to interact with their audience by prompting them with questions on screen and displaying their results. 

MAYA is free, open source and in continued development. Follow this guide to install MAYA on your own website.

MAYA was designed for use in radiology resident conferences but can be applied to any scenario where presenters would like to poll the audience.

Installation Guide:

  • Sign up with a web-host.  
    • We use bluehost and this step by step guide is based on installing MAYA on bluehost. Installation should be very similar when using other hosts. There are other free options but they’re usually not as reliable and most don’t support php and mysql which are required.
  • Download MAYA. Unzup the file to create a MAYA_v3 folder. Remember its location.
  • Access your cPanel (link at the upper right side of bluehost.com or yourdomain/cpanel). Under the Databases tab select MySQL Databases. 
  • Create a new database (pick any name)

  • Add a new user

  • Give your new user access to your new database

  • In the MAYA_v3 folder you’ll find the sqluser.php file. Open it with a text editing program (such as TextEdit). Substitute root with your new username, maya with your new database name and enter the password under $pass. Keep the quotations in place. Save the sqluser file.

  • Select phpMyAdmin from cPanel. Login with your username and password. Click on the database you created (you’ll find it on the left side of the screen). Select the Import tab. Click on chose file and import the _MAYADB_.sql file in the MAYA_v3 folder. After importing the file you should see 3 new tables under your database name in phpMyAdmin: answers, fillin and users. 
  • Select Unlimited FTP from cPanel. On the local side navigate to the contents of the MAYA_v3 folder. On the server side double click the public_html folder. Transfer the contents of the MAYA_v3 folder to public_html. 
  • MAYA should now be up and running at yourdomain.com/maya .Test it out.

USING MAYA:

Presenters:

The graph page can be found at yourdomain.com/maya/graph.php. You can use it to navigate between questions. The fill in answer page can be found at yourdomain.com/maya/table.php.  The graph needs to be reset before every lecture. The fill in page needs to be reset before every question. 

The most convenient way to display MAYA is to toggle back and forth between the presentation and web browser. For a more polished look, graphs can be embedded into powerpoint slides using a plug in called LiveWeb. 

Audience:

The Audience can access the interface via yourdomain.com/maya. Logging in is optional and activates the attendance and notes features. To manage attendance create a username: admin. When logged in as admin you can edit attendance records. 

If you are presenting to the same audience repeatedly you can have them bookmark maya or add maya to their home-screens.

HAVE FUN!

Please contact us via email with any questions, comments or suggestions. 

Thank you,

J. Jacob Kazam M.D. and George Shih, M.D.