Client

Thejas Gopalappa, Correspondent, Swamy Vivekananda Matric Higher Secondary School, Tamil Nadu, India
Email: <thejas.gopal@gmail.com>

Student contact

Ramya Narasimha, <rn343@cornell.edu>, is setting up a team for this project. If you are interested in joining the team, please contact him.

About the Organization

Swamy Vivekananda Matric Higher Secondary School (SVMS) is a privately run institution started in 1992. SVMS is situated in Bagalur, a village in Tamil Nadu, India and has an enrollment of around 800 students (Kindergarten through 12th Grade) and 38 teaching staff. The students here are primarily from the villages in and around Bagalur.

Project Goals

About 70% of the parents of the school are either uneducated or ill-literate. The KG sections of the school have been facing trouble communicating daily homeworks or activities of the students to the parents in written form in English. The teachers are having to contact the parents on a daily basis to explain homeworks and activities. This has led to an increase in the number of after work hours for these primary teachers. Instead the students would benefit if the teachers focus on other important activities rather than spend additional time with the parents, manually entering attendance and filling progress reports of the students. The parents also have no means of tracking their children’s progress, activities, fee payments etc. The school is looking for a system which serves as an effective means of communication between the parents, teachers and the school management.

In the last few years, the smartphone market has penetrated into the rural sections of the country and the school management at SVMS wants to use this as an advantage in solving their problem. Most parents in the school use Android smartphones and the school intends to build a system where the daily activities of the students can be tracked on their smartphones.

Project Summary

As mentioned above, we would like the team to create a performance tracking web application involving three views, one each for the teachers, students and the management. The emphasis must be on the simplicity of the interfaces considering the kind of users using the application. The core features of this system include:

1. Attendance Tracking
   • The teachers must have an option to take attendance by swiping through the list of students and marking them as ‘present’ or ‘absent’. The same results must be reflected in every student’s profile when seen by the parents in their view.
2. Homeworks and other activities
   • The teachers should be able to add homeworks to each student and the same must be reflected in every student’s profile when seen by the parents in their view. The teachers must have an option to add common homeworks to the entire class.
   • The school administration must be able to add any pending tuition fee to each student and the same must be reflected in every student’s profile when seen by the parents in their view.
3. Progress Reports
   • The teachers must be able to add scores of tests to each student and the same must be reflected in every student’s profile when seen by the parents in their view. The system must have capabilities to take inputs of scores in individual courses and provide a total, percentage and student’s rank in the class.
4. Enrolling students into the class
   • The teachers must be able to add students into their sections of a class with a click of a button by simply selecting a particular section and adding them to their class.
5. Feedback System
   • The teachers, parents and management must be able to communicate individually within the application to provide feedback or complaints about any issues involving student’s performance.