When middle-school (and sometimes high-school) students go out of the school supervisory staff need to check their authorizations to leave the school (for example during the lunch or when a professor is absent). At rush hours hundreds of students can leave the school at the same time. Then the staff needs to speed up the checking to reduce the flow of student.
At these times, mistakes can easily be done and the job of the staff gets harder. Moreover, only a few members of the staff are trained for the checking, all the administrative staff (which for small structure are important figures for students) can not proceed to the checkup because of its relative complexity (lot of information rely on the comprehension of the supervisory staff).
And the tracking of student punishment is really hard to sustain. Each day staff need to check if students of the last day have done their punishment, if not they have to get them during the lectures, which is often not possible. And students can in general not catch at the exit of the school because the staff need to exactly know the student. It ends up with a list of students that have not done their punishment reported from day to day by the staff give up on them in order to not accumulate the delay.
For all of its reason a modular system which can be adapted to the rules of a specific structure and that will do the checkup (under the supervision of a human) is a good point: no more training is needed to do the checkup because all the procedure will end up with a simple message "Authorized" or "Unauthorized" and for the specific cases student just has to be oriented to a trained person).
The procedure is made up of two components:
- Verify if the student has no lectures at that time (that imply dynamically checking canceled lectures)
- Verify if the student has been authorized by its legal representative to leave the school in case of a canceled lecture
- Verify if the student has been punished and then need to stay at school or if he skip a previous punishment
- Verify other custom rules that are school specific
A lot of school uses an external provider for handling student timetable, canceled lectures and other information on students. Then the system needs to scrap all the data of this provider to populated a local database that will store the time slots when each student can exit the school. Because that part is school specific, the choice has been made to exclude the scrapping script from the main app to keep it modular as possible. The script will act on the database and then when needed the modifications will be seen by the main app which will decide according to the time and the database if a student can leave the school.
Real time modification is not possible here because of the fluctuation of the network and the stability of the provider which are not being made in response to hundreds of requests in a short period of time. Then the script will update the database in the middle of each hour and a pipe between the main application and the script will notify the main application if the update has been interrupted (because of an error, of the network,...). In that case, the main application will notify all the client to proceed manually to the checkup (to avoid having students exit the school because of an old and inaccurate information).
That script also updates "exit ban" which will override all other authorizations to leave the school for a student (or for a whole class). The configuration of the exit ban is up to the school because the script has to be rewritten for each school.
The server responses to the main requests :
- if a student can leave the school
- add an exit ban manually (that will be stored in a different table than the ban set by the script in the database)
- add an authorization manually
- change user parameters
Because all computers in a school are locally connected the use a of server/client design has been bright to the light quickly. It allow a member of the staff to access the system anywhere in the school.
Each user has a specific role associated with rights (than can be edited in a custom way). For example, no registration is needed to check if a student can leave the school, supervisory staff can add an exit ban, chef of the supervisory staff can add a new authorization but not other members of that staff. Because in small team session are used by multiple person, the add of a ban or an authorization has to be validated by a unique 4 character password (and is always asked). In other words, each ban or authorization is associated with a unique user that is not necessarily the one connected to the opened session.
All the client and server side can be adapted to the school rules without modifying their source code.
The database has first need to be populated with the basic information on student (their first name, last name, section and their half board days). That information can be added directly through the main application from a csv file (the order of the column can be edited in the main application). Be aware that if the first and last name of students does not exactly match the ones of the external provider students will not be updated (in other words, they will always be unauthorized to leave the school until the official end of the school or if they are allowed to leave the school for lunch).
For each student a unique id is associated and can/has to be manually added.
No need to install a software, the clients just access the server through a web browser.
Since each student owns a liaison dairy the unique id will be added to that diary through an RFID (as hardware read only to avoid modification of the data by a student) sticker.
The front end is composed of a TV that will display a photo of the student, his first and last name, his section, and the result of the request "can he leaves the school" (notice that in case of an unauthorized exit a relatively loud song is played, and can be custom).
The default ban reasons are set through the main application
The timetable of the authorization section is dynamically created based on the hours given to the main application
Finally a log file can be viewed and download for each student/section
All the modification (ban/authorization) can be made for a single student or for the whole section
Windows app (C#)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.1 ou greater (x86 or x64)
- SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB
Python 3 script
- Add the given database "Database_Students_Management" to your SQL server*
- Add the name of your SQL server to the main application. If you don't know its name you can use the SQL server manager (download it if needed) and then click on the server instance, you use to attach the database (the name of your server is then between parenthesis). By default the server name used in the main application is "(LocalDB)\MSSQLLocalDB"
- Add the IP address/port for the server. Be aware to not use the application through WIFI because client and server communicate using HTTP (then without any encryption).
- At startup the application will check for user profiles in the database. If it found not user, then it will allow the current user to create a super user account (but it can lead to security issue).