Academic Gateway application for school attendance tracking

Mitrix developed a multifunctional application for student management and activity tracking for several schools in different cities.

Academic Gateway application for school attendance tracking

Background

The client is a Swiss private school called Academic Gateway. The school trains students at the highest level and prepares them for admission to a university. Success in examinations at this school gives a chance to enter almost any university in the world without competition.

The tuition fee for one year at this school is quite high, but the school has a system of benefits. If a student has not passed the annual exams, but he or she has attended 95% of classes or more, such a student has the right to re-take this course for free.

 

Problem

To decide if a particular student has a right to use benefits, the school needs to track students’ attendance. But successfully monitoring the attendance of all students is quite a difficult task. The school did not have a unified format for storing students’ information, payments, tracking for equipment issued to a student, etc. The analysis of different sources of information took a very long time.

Therefore, it was decided to create an automated electronic system for attendance tracking.

After successfully completing the Vivatum case, Mitrix was recommended by this company to the Academic Gateway as a reliable contractor.

 

Challenge

The client contacted Mitrix on August 1, 2020, and requested the first version of the application to be released by August 17.

The main purpose of the application was to help the administration track attendance. It makes decisions about the provision of fee exemption easier.

The project consists of a web app and an application for scanning devices.

First of all, Mitrix has decided to create an application to collect and store students’ attendance data.

The application should be developed for Windows tablets that will read students’ access cards and send data to the system. The application must also process and organize all data.

Main functionality needed:

  • Login
  • User management
  • Student management
  • School management
  • Time log management
  • Timetabling
  • Generation period reports

 

Application goals

The first goal of the application was to collect and store student attendance data.

Students have electronic cards, which they scan after entering the classroom and before leaving it. All data are stored in a database. The administrator is able to enter data manually. There is also an option to load a CSV file with attendance data directly into the system.

If a teacher missed a lesson for some reason, it is possible to mark this in the system so students will not be counted as absent.

The second goal of the application is to analyze data and make attendance reports.

The app should record if students are late, absent, or attend lectures.

The application should also allow you to organize all the data about students and school processes in one system. It also should provide end-to-end analytics for the entire training period.

 

Solution

The first version of the app was released on August 17, 2020. It simply provided the ability to store all the collected data.

By the end of 2020, the second version of the application was released. In the new release was added the ability to analyze in percent how many classes a particular student has attended and prepare annual reports.

Since the school did not have a unified format for storing students’ information, a lot of time was consumed by collecting and combining data from separate Excel files and uploading it into the system.

Now the third version is lined up. It should be more focused on the work with students. The notification system for them would possibly be added.

 

Results

At the moment, 14 classrooms in 4 buildings are connected to the system. There is a scanning device at the entrance to each room. Students are checking in when they enter the room and checking out as they leave it. All devices are integrated into the system and connected to web storage. Each tablet also has local storage. Data can be stored there if the web server is unavailable. If the connection is lost, there is always an option to restore the backup on each device.

The customer has several schools in different cities, so at the very beginning, the project was developed with an eye toward connecting each school independently. Now it is possible to add a new school at any time and receive analytics on it.

Academic Gateway wants to continue cooperation with Mitrix. At the moment two companies are negotiating the work on the 3rd version of the application. The project budget would exceed the previous one several-fold.

Technologies

  • .net core
  • angular 11
  • MS SQL
  • WFP (App for cards)
  • Azure App Services

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