Inspiration
Taking attendance in classrooms with over 400 students is a hassle. Professors and TA's spent too much time manually recording students attendances, exam submissions, and tabulating grades.
What it does
By taking advantage of students' unique ID numbers (obtained from their ID cards) we are creating an application that uses a barcode scanner to swiftly and effortlessly capture students' attendance in the classroom as well as provide instant email/txt confirmation (proof of submission) of exam and quiz submissions.
How we built it
We decided to host our application interface on a website so that it can be accessible through a variety of platforms. Our idea is to have the section TA or the professor log onto our website (either from their phone or computer) and select the class in which they want to take attendance. They can choose to add to an existing attendance file or create a new one. To this end, we built a SQLite database, hosted on the Google Cloud Platform, that would keep track of the attendance records.
Challenges we ran into
The most challenging part of our work was coming up with an intuitive yet fail-proof design. Our ultimate goal is to devise a system that could be used across multiple departments by different instructors and TAs. For this reason, we wanted to automate our design as much as possible, so people with no programming experience would find our application easy to use.
This is our first time attempting to set up a web interface and working with the SQLite database.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We didn't have prior experience with front-end development. We're most proud of our accomplishments of connecting the front-end and back-end
What we learned
We learned a bit of front-end and back-end development as well as using SQLite, the GCP platform, and Flask.
What's next for CruzScanner
Making our website secure in the future and implementing a log-in is one of our biggest priority. We want to be able to transfer over our application to a mobile application so that we can use the phone's built in camera as a barcode reader, making our project portable and cost-effective.
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