Q&A with EMU junior Doran Kennedy, the keeper of the caf’s question box

For the hundreds of EMU students, faculty and staff who stream through the dining hall doors for their meals, every day is an election day.

A few paces outside those doors sits the question box. Its white, wooden exterior and five rainbow-colored buttons might appear unassuming, but its questions are anything but simple.

Do you think writing in cursive is a necessary skill? Would you go without internet for a year for $10,000? How young is too young for a child to have a smartphone? Are there more doors or wheels in the world? Those are just a few of the stumpers it’s asked.

Caleb Hostetler ’23 created the question box — otherwise known, in its code, as the EMU Views and Opinions-A-Tron (EMU VOAT) — for his honors capstone project during the 2022 fall semester. 

“Students will say, ‘I want my project to live on,’ but it doesn’t always work out,” said Hostetler, who works as an electrical engineer near Cleveland, Ohio. “When I was designing this, I put a lot of effort into having someone else other than me run it. I’m glad to see, at least for a semester or two, it’s surviving after I left.”

After graduating last spring with an engineering and mathematics degree, he left his project in the capable hands of EMU students Doran Kennedy and Adam Hoover, who keep it running each day. 

We sat down with Kennedy, a junior biochemistry major from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to find out how he comes up with his questions, what some of the most surprising results have been and whether sharks or gorillas would win in a fight.

How were you two (Doran and Adam) chosen to continue the project?

Caleb put out a Google form in the Royal Radar and was like, ‘Does anyone want to take this over after I graduate?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, that could be fun.’

The Royal Radar?

It’s a campuswide group chat with about 600 people in it.

What’s in the machine powering it?

There’s a monitor in there sticking through the wooden frame, and we’ve got a small computer called a Raspberry Pi and it’s running off that. Every five minutes, it will connect with the server on campus and it’ll update itself with new poll results. Editor’s Note: For the past couple months, the server has been down and, unfortunately, so has the question box. Thanks to the tireless work of EMU Professor and computer whiz Stefano Colafranceschi, the question box is now back up and running.

Where do you get the ideas for the questions from?

A lot of it is either my own invention, someone else suggested it to me or I found it online. We do have a link on there — people can go to the website and they can suggest their own questions, but we haven’t gotten a whole lot of those.

Are there any questions that stick out in your mind as especially weird or wacky?

There was one recently where I thought it would be cool to see what building people spent the most time in. I know we have a lot of STEM majors here, but it leaned a lot more ‘Science Center’ than I thought it would.

Is there an average number of votes per question?

On weekends, we probably get 150 if we’re lucky. But, on weekdays, it’s usually upwards of 200 to 300.

They’re pretty great questions — have there been any results that have shocked or surprised you?

My friends and I had a debate the previous day about a topic and I put it in the poll box to see who would win. It was, ‘If you bake two lasagnas and stack them on top of each other, is it one lasagna or two lasagnas?’ I thought it was a funny question, and I am very much of the school of thought that it is one lasagna, so I hoped to prove my friends wrong, which I think I actually did.

That’s one of those great philosophical questions like, ‘How many holes does a straw have?’ Actually, in our building we have a long-running debate about who would win in a fight: three gorillas or five great white sharks. They’re on a neutral site where the sharks can swim through the air like it’s water.

Oh, interesting. Wait, is it three gorillas and five sharks? Well, for sure, it’s the sharks.

That seems to be what the majority of people think

It’s probably the right answer.

Is there a website where people can view the results?

It’s the same one people go to submit their questions. We have an IP address (http://10.3.60.120) on the screen and they type that into their browser and, as long as they’re on EMU wifi, they can go in and see the list of all the previous questions that have been asked.

Have you ever run into the issue of someone repeatedly pressing a button?

I wouldn’t really know, but the machine does have a sort of cooldown time, where if you press the buttons too quickly, it will say something like, ‘Slow down, wait three seconds,’ to stop people from spamming. But, I guess if someone was really dedicated, they could just stand there and tap it every three seconds.

Is there any thought that maybe the colors of the buttons affect people’s choices?

I’ve always heard that, in marketing, people are drawn to red. I haven’t noticed any correlation, but then again, I haven’t been looking.

What’s the best part of running the machine?

I like hearing when people enjoy using it. I think coming up with the questions is also really fun, and thinking ‘Yeah, that would turn heads, that would get people’s attention.’

The questions seem a bit deeper than surface-level. It’s not like, ‘What’s your favorite color?’

I do think it would be funny to ask, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ and then make sure none of the colors of the buttons match the answers.

What are you up to when you’re not coming up with questions or studying?

I like playing video games. I run a game show on campus called EMU Taskmaster and I’ve been running it for four seasons so far, once a semester. The last one was won by Josh Stucky.

Any plans for after you graduate in 2025?

I’m probably going to go to graduate school at some point. Not right away, though. I think I want to build some experience first and then we’ll probably see about grad school.

Answers have been edited for conciseness