An Academic Attendance Tracking System

Abstract

Most of the academic institutions in Sri Lanka use pen and paper to track attendance of students. When working with primary materials there can be wrong calculations, students can cheat lecturers, consume a lot of time to sign and sometimes reduce attention to the lectures. Therefore to assist this process a computerized attendance monitoring system is required. Basically this system is intended for the universities but also it suites for the schools as well. This proposed system is capable of tracking students' attendance with the help of a fingerprint scanner and a personal computer. There are two major parts in this project. The first part is tracking students' attendance in the lectures by using a fingerprint reader and storing the data in a database. To develop this functionality vb.net was used as the computer language and mySQL was used as the database server. The second part consists of a website which allows students to view their attendance as well as lecturers to view their students' attendance in the lectures. Through the website the administrator can send SMS to the students who have not obtained eighty percent of attendance level and generate reports for the administration purposes. PHP was used as the main language to develop this system. The system is also capable to handle user management functionalities such as adding a new user, deleting a user, change attendance, changing user details and adding or deleting data in the database. The work presented here describes the testing and evaluation of the system on a sample data set gathered from Uva Wellassa University. This project developed a prototype for the future implementation of student attendance monitoring system and a technology based reliable solution to support the university students' attendance tracking process. Key words: mySQL, PHP