Automated Attendance in Zoom

Automating Attendance in Zoom (A2Z)

MoCoHacks 2021 Submission

Ethan Paley, Grade 10, Walter Johnson High School

Submission Track: Education

Problem to be Solved: Taking attendance during Zoom class sessions. Five minutes are wasted at the beginning of every Zoom class taking attendance. My teachers employ two different methods to do attendance, but both are equally inefficient. Traditional Roll-Call: Students must unmute (which can take a while); students may not feel comfortable unmuting if their background is noisy; students may not hear their name called, and traditional roll-call takes a long time in classes with 30+ students. Checking the Participants List: The participants list is alphabetized by student’s first name, whereas Synergy Attendance is alphabetized by last name; checking the participants list takes just as long as roll-call; and students often focus their attention elsewhere, perhaps thinking that the teacher isn’t paying attention to the class yet.

Value Proposition of Hack: Create more instructional time. The Automating Attendance in Zoom (A2Z) hack determines which students if any are late or absent from each class period. A2Z has the potential to save class time and reduce the teacher’s workload up to five times per day! It seems like every class these days goes over the one-hour time limit, so these 5 minutes may really count, especially when we are already losing 105 minutes of instructional time a week from being online/hybrid during the pandemic. If teachers did not have to manually take attendance, each student could gain back up to 80 minutes of class per week.

Description of Hack: Lists tardy and absent students in a teacher’s Zoom channel. A2Z keeps track of who joins each class meeting, who joins late, and, most importantly, who from the class roster does not join at all. At the end of the Zoom meeting, A2Z generates the list of tardy and absent students and sends it to the teacher’s private Zoom channel.

Technical Approach: I designed a software workflow that integrates Zoom and Google Sheets. The workflow that connects Zoom to Google Sheets is based on Pipedream, which is an integration platform for developers to build and run workflows that integrate apps and data. There are two separate Pipedream workflows, each with an event trigger and subsequent actions. The Pipedream workflows interact with two spreadsheets in the teacher’s Google Drive: the first spreadsheet contains the class rosters and the second spreadsheet stores real-time attendance data and a custom algorithm that generates the tardy and absent lists. The first Pipedream workflow is triggered whenever a student joins the meeting; their name, email, and time of arrival is added to the data spreadsheet. Searching through the roster spreadsheet for the first student to join the class determines the current period and therefore the appropriate class roster. This event also includes a timestamp; anyone who joins the class more than ten minutes late is considered tardy. Subsequent participants are automatically added to the data spreadsheet; their student ID is extracted from their email and they are marked Present or Tardy depending on when they join the meeting. The second Pipedream workflow is triggered when the meeting ends. Students on the class roster for the current period who have not joined the meeting are marked Absent in the data spreadsheet. Then the list of Tardy and Absent students is sent as a message to a channel in the teacher’s Zoom client.

Conclusion: Overall, I learned a lot making A2Z for MoCoHacks. Actually, I learned how much I don’t know. Connecting and integrating various applications was very challenging. My original plan was to create a Zoom Chat Bot that would enable students to interact with and play a computer game on the teacher’s computer. I spent some time setting up this bot, following a tutorial I found online -- but it didn’t work. The second thing I learned, right then, is that it’s okay to not win, but at the same time, I shouldn’t give up. I scrapped that idea. After brainstorming with my friend Luke, my original MoCoHacks partner, we came up with the idea of an attendance bot. Automating the process of taking Zoom attendance would be really useful, confirmed my mom, an MCPS teacher. Finding Pipedream was a real breakthrough, because it makes possible the integration of Zoom with a huge number of external applications. Once I started coding JavaScript inside Google Sheets, I realized how powerful Sheets is too. If there is anything I’d add to A2Z it would be integration with a Zoom Chat Bot, so the teacher could enter a command and get the attendance list live at any point in the class, in Zoom chat. However, Zoom Chat Bots require admin privileges to test, so I couldn’t try out that idea. Otherwise, I am very pleased with my hack, and hopeful that it might save at least one teacher (my mom) from the hassle of taking attendance on Zoom. I had fun with MoCoHacks and look forward to doing it again in the future.