Tech Innovations In Tier 2 Colleges: Students Develop Smart Attendance App For Schools & Colleges

So, we all were waiting for news like this to brighten up our day: though technology has indeed penetrated inside urban and rural areas through smartphones and gizmos, has our thought process become more innovative in term of applying technology for our use? Are we content playing Temple Run and Subway Surfer or do we get inspired from it? Is tech only for the big-shot intellectuals to develop or has the thought indeed filtered down to grassroots level?

Shri Vaishnav Institute of Technology and Science College, an Indore based Tier II college offering graduate and post-graduate courses in engineering, is probably never been written or heard about. But not after this!

Three of its final year students have developed a project called Smart Attendance Management system ‘Wizard’ which will help teachers mark the attendance automatically on their computer system or smartphones. It is surely not earth-breaking news but considering it has been developed by students from a nondescript college, it is surely worth an applause.

Though the app is yet to be officially launched on the Google Play store and we are yet to know how the professors would respond to it, this is a great way to begin. The students who developed the application include Murtaza Bagwala, Divyendu Yadav and Neel Madhav Panda.

One of the students Murtaza said, “This app will help the teachers/professors to mark the attendance on their system, laptop or any smartphone they use.” So this will also help save the tedious work of marking attendance in registers and to keep record.

They added that it is fast, efficient, accurate and most importantly secure too. With fewer margins for error, students would have a hard time blaming teachers for not marking them present when they were actually bunking classes!

They added: “Here teachers only have to bring in their tablets or an android phones instead of attendance registers to class rooms and run this application. The attendance will be automatically submitted to the central computer of school/college and after that teachers can generate various reports.” Also, the application will show the status of attendance of students and that data will be sent through SMS to their parents, thus hardly causing any possibility of errors during compilation or sending status to parents.

The project has been accepted by their college and efforts are on to convince other colleges to introduce this application. The students took around sixty days to complete it. The approximate cost incurred was around Rs. 30,000.

It’s quite heartening to see tech innovation sparks being lighted in even in smaller towns or Tier 2 cities. There is no reason, why we should not expect a world class tech platform coming out of these places. All we need is more colleges to create platforms and incorporate a culture which goes much beyond textbooks and marks and more towards a creative and innovative mindset.

What do you feel?