Attendance Guru

Background

The Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF) hosts the Afterschool Classroom Enrichment (ACE) Program in which IPSF recruits instructors to teach one-hour classes after school across 40+ Irvine Unified School District (IUSD) schools every season.

Problem

Currently, IPSF recruits Monitors and Coordinators (parent volunteers) for each IUSD school to manually track attendance through paper spreadsheets. This process involves each parent being in person to gather all attendance sheets and check if there are any missing students. Parents need to then locate students which can take upward of 20-30 minutes, meaning that a missing student will miss a majority of their class time.

Solution

Our team has partnered with IPSF to develop Attendance Guru, a web-based mobile attendance tracking system, which aims to decrease the time it takes for parent volunteers to track attendance for ACE classes and locate students.

Meet the Team

Aasha Sendhil | Amy Fong | Daniel Yi | Iris Nguyen | Jareice Graham

Our Sponsors

Kerri Fung | Stephanie Bynon

Research & Development

Understanding User Needs & Priorities

Field Site Observation

The team visited Vista Verde Elementary to observe the attendance taking process for their ACE classes. One interesting finding when observing a Speech and Debate class was that the Instructor noticed an extra student present. This observation inspired the Notes feature that will be discussed in the BLANK section.

Personas

We developed personas for each type of user involved with the application.

Instructor: Person responsible for taking initial attendance at the start of ACE class.
Monitor: Parent volunteer responsible for tracking missing students.
Coordinator: Parent volunteer responsible for managing Monitors at the IUSD school they volunteer for.
Contractor: Organization coordinator responsible for recruiting Instructors for ACE classes.
Administrator: IPSF Staff member responsible for coordinating the ACE program.

The Personas guided our user stories by keeping users' technology proficiency in mind. In doing so, the team was able to prioritize the guidance and intuitiveness of the application.

User Stories

After meeting with some Coordinators and Contractors during sponsor meetings, we were able to discern what each user needs from the application. Instructors are more concerned with getting their classes started as soon as possible. The team determined that Instructors will have the most limited view of the system in which they are only able to view classes they teach and their corresponding attendance sheets. Monitors have more access in the system as they will be able to view classes taught for the specific day for which they volunteer and edit the attendance sheets for those classes. Coordinators will have the same view as the Monitors, with the exception to view all ACE classes taught at the IUSD school for which the Coordinator volunteers. Contractors will be able to view all ACE classes they provide for IUSD schools and to assign Instructors to those classes. Administrators will have access to everything. They will be able to edit attendance sheets, track individual students' attendance, and enable and disable any accounts at their discretion.

The user stories were developed in Miro. The team received sponsor feedback as we spent two weeks reiterating the user stories. It was important for us to understand all user perspectives involved in order to limit scope creep and to focus on the interaction between different user accounts.

Attendance Guru User Stories

Medium Fidelity Prototypes

Using Figma, we developed the wireframes shown below. The team met with our sponsors weekly to receive feedback. We also met with members of our anticipated user base to receive their input as well. It was rather difficult to coordinate times to meet with our potential users given the busy nature of their work, so we sincerely value their input and feedback regarding the designs.

The slides below describe the design decisions we made for the application based on personas and user stories.

Slide 1: Marking Attendance
Slide 2: Student Information
Slide 3: Notes Feature
Slide 4: User Guidance
Slide 5: Monitor/Coordinator Home Page

Attendance Guru - Mockups

Project Management

For task management between design, documentation, and technical development, the team utilized Trello. After prototyping mid-fi wireframes, the team had a 2-hour planning session to estimate task duration and priorities.

Tasks were planned on a 2-week sprint basis. Every sprint, the team would reflect on what went well, what did not go well, and how we could improve the following sprint. These reflections guided our development process as we used those times to determine the following sprint's goals.

Evaluation

Throughout the 20-week journey, the design of the mobile application has undergone reviews in the meetings we've had with our partners, Kerri and Stephanie, and with the contractors and monitors they've connected us to.

In these meetings, we've presented deliverables ranging from early mockups to the final product, and have often received satisfactory feedback. Constructive feedback tend to have focused on the minor details, such as sticking to IPSF's terminology throughout, as well as the major details, like making sure the application caters to the user's role in terms of functionality and access to data.

Final Product & Demo

Our final product was a comprehensive attendance system designed to streamline the process of tracking and managing student attendance. This system not only facilitated the daily marking of student presence but also allows for remote access to these attendance sheets, ensuring that users can retrieve and review attendance data from any location. Additionally, our solution includes a contractor overview page. This page serves as a central platform where contractors can onboard new instructors and gain insights into the courses they are managing. By integrating these features, our final product not only meets but exceeds the functional requirements set forth by our client, providing a seamless and efficient user experience. Other deliverables provided to our sponsor include detailed documentation of the system, and a comprehensive support plan to ensure future development and maintenance of the system.

Demo Video

The demo video showcases a user scenario where a contractor views an overview of instructors and courses. It demonstrates how they can generate new instructor accounts and also illustrates how an instructor manages class attendance.

attendance-guru-demo.mp4

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