ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Student Automatic Attendance Tracker

Absolutely Acceptably Appropriate, Accurate, Automated, Accessible Animal Attendance Application for American Academics (AAAAAAAAAAA) ← that is 11 A's 

For those who are more "binarily" inclined that is 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010 1010, reason being that our project will take in and process many inputs and outputs (I/O).

Statement of Purpose

Our app will be used for tasks such as class attendance tracking, car tracking, livestock/human monitoring, and location-based notification sending. In addition, our app will provide school administration with the ability to check Safer Illinois statuses for every student/staff/community member who enters a building on campus.

Background Research

We did research on trucking companies and found their truck tracking systems to be very practical and we wanted to make this idea into a device compatible with the Safer Illinois app. We want to enable event-holders to use this device to send notifications to nearby students to alert them to ongoing events. We have also seen tracking used in potato packets and Josh's Bean Machine where disposable trackers are placed on beans as they go through the manufacturing process and the flow is tracked to make sure the beans are flowing smoothly and not getting jammed. This project's importance lies in the fact that events often go on without anyone the wiser. As such, many students miss out on the opportunity to participate in campus activities. We've seen many lonely students in the past month, and we hope our system can help them find RSOs and other interest groups where they can build meaningful relationships. Most importantly, we're here to assist schools in making sure students show up for school and track attendance in a manner which is visible to both the school and student, so as to discourage truancy, the high rates (>11%!) of which are quite evident in middle and high schools around the world.

Block Diagram / Flow Chart

System Overview

Our device begins by analyzing the input provided to the Arduino microprocessor which determines the next steps of our program. The Arduino makes calculations based on the sensor data. For example, our GPS module will tell us the location of the user and we will determine whether they are within range of our geo-fence. For our academic attendance app, the students will all be registered with the geo-fencing system. When they enter within range of the geofencer i.e. the classroom, our app will automatically mark them as present. The information will be stored within a spreadsheet in the app that the teacher can easily access and determine which students are absent or not, saving valuable instruction time. We also plan to further our project by creating a variety of administrative roles such as a "Teacher" who can automatically unlock certain appliances within the classroom just by being in the vicinity.

Parts

Provide a list of parts that you may need for your project. You should include details such as the quantity, model number, purpose, vendor, and price (excluding taxes and shipping) for each part. This list may change as you work on your project. 

Possible Challenges

Please list some of the challenges that your group foresee in working on your project.

Some possible challenges we might have will most likely lie within the software section of our project. Our alert system will need to recognize whether the user has entered or exited the area and also determine what corresponding info to send to the user based on that data. Additionally, we need to implement some sort of privacy setting for the notification system which will determine whether our program runs specific sections or not. A problem that students can do to bypass our system is for one friend in a friend group to bring in everyone's attendance taker, which would cause problems for truly tracking the attendance (although the teacher can probably easily catch on to this). We can potentially solve this problem by making sure that the attendance takers are not all right next to each other. Another issue we may have to address is making sure that one teacher's system is not trying to take attendance of students in other classrooms. This should be fine since we can just geofence the area that covers a classroom, but it can be a problem nonetheless if classrooms get switched around or if there is passing period.

References

List all references you used in your proposal. This is important, you do not want to be blamed for plagiarism. IEEE citation format is highly recommended. You can use citethisforme.com's IEEE citation generator to painlessly generate your references in this style.

[1]"Geofencing for fleet & freight management", Ieeexplore.ieee.org, 2009. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5399328. [Accessed: 18- Sep- 2021]

[2]"Geofencing 2.0 | Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing", Dl.acm.org, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2632048.2636093. [Accessed: 18- Sep- 2021]