Taking attendance in class takes a lot of valuable class time that can be spent on learning. We need to maximize the amount of information that children can learn each day during school, to better improve their education and their futures. Calling students' names out loud and checking them off one-by-one is an outdated and slow process that can be drastically improved with technology. This is why we decided to use facial recognition with Microsoft's Face API to build a system that takes a picture of a classroom of students, and compares it with a database of individual student pictures, and marks the students as present or absent.
We used React for the front-end of our application and Node.js for the backend, as well as a Cosmos database to store the students' images. Without having previous experience with facial recognition, Azure, or Microsoft API's in general, we learned a lot from our time here in DubHacks. We learned how to design an entire application while connecting the front-end, back-end, and database to create a functioning program. We split our team to work on separate tasks that came together later on: Two working on the React front-end app, two working on the Node.js back-end code to get the facial recognition working, and one working on the UI/UX design and project management.
We faced several challenges throughout the entire process. These challenges mostly stem from a lack of previous experience in the technologies and programming languages that we used, as well as figuring out how to connect the different aspects of the project and general debugging. Although our project is not fully functional at the moment, we are very excited about our concept and the possibility of improving the way classrooms can take attendance in the future to ensure maximum time used for student learning.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.