DPEP ATTENDANCE MONITORING SYSTEM Semester Project (7th Semester) Shaurya Arora - 99066
Background
The Govt. of Andhra Pradesh has a primary education programme called the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP). DPEP is incharge of all the government schools imparting education from class I to class VI in the 2000 odd mandals of the state of Andhra Pradesh. These Government schools impart education at highly subsidised rates and cater mainly to the highly migrant population. As such, the dropout rate in these schools is alarmingly high. In an effort to identify potential dropouts, DPEP decided, at the suggestion of the Chief Minister, to automate and computerise the attendance monitoring system. The parties that were tasked with this were DPEP MIS Department, Tata Consultancy Services and IIIT.
Overview
In the current manual setup, the attendance monitoring authority, i.e the Mandal Education Officer (MEO) visits each school twice a month on random dates. At the school he verifies the attendance for the school as marked in the register versus the actual attendance. This system has two drawbacks :
a) It takes up too much of teaching time b) It is not possible to identify potential dropouts.
Thus, DPEP was looking for an economical automated solution. After many brainstorming sessions the solution proposed was te following. Each MEO would carry with him a handheld computing device. He would also have a desktop computer at his headquarters which would contain the database of various schools under his supervision. Before leaving for each school he would load the appropriate database into the handheld. At the school, he would only have to tap at the appropriate location. While tapping on the students name, the students attendance record for the last visit is also displayed. Thus the system is fast and the MEO also gets an indication of potential dropouts. Another advantage is that when the MEO returns to headquarters, he uploads the attendance record to his desktop. This data is also tranferred to a central online location. Various data processing can now be carried out on this and the information is available online.
Flow of Information
The following chart shows the flow of information.
It also shows the software component and responsibility for that components. This project deals with the handheld frontend and the transfer utility only. Implementation Details
The major impediment to implementation was the choice of handheld computing device. After considering various options such as Palm, Simputer and Casio, it was decided that the Casio PV600 offers the best price, performance and programming complexity trade- off. The software on the handheld is written in C, and compiled using the Casio Compiler. The software for the transfer utility is written in MS VB and uses the standard MSCOMM32 control for data communication.
Screenshots and Software Description
The following screenshots expalin the working of the software.
Current Status
The system is ready and currently awaiting final acceptance and implementation by user (Department of Education, Government of Andhra Pradesh).
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL USING GSM MODEM AND SMS
Background
During the December 2002 National Games the organisers wanted to provide a value added service in the form of results over SMS. The state transport department was also interested in a similar systems to be used for their fleet management as well as transport rules violations. Thus, we were tasked with demonstrating the feasibility of such a proposal.
Overview
The cellular companies in the country have set up a comprehensive GSM network. As part of the value added services they offer Short Messaging Service (SMS). SMS allows one to send and receive text messages of upto 160 characters. The charges for this service are very economical and thus this service forms the ideal basis for information sharing and broadcasting. Companies such as indiatimes, India Today group and many cell companies are already using this medium to offer a host of information services. We were asked by the various departments of the Government of Andhra Pradesh to evaluate the feasibilty of implementing such an information system. We demonstarted the feasibility by setting up an SMS backend, which, on the basis of a query replies to the sender with the information required. The system, worked adqueatly and was subsequently adopted by another team which developed the frontend to make it work for the National Games 2002.
Flowchart
The following flowchart explains the working of the system as seen from the SMS server
The above flowchart represents a generic backend for any SMS based information system. Our task was to show that the above system can work.
Implementation Details
The demonstration system was developed using the Nokia Mobile Terminal (MT). The Nokia Mobile Terminal is a fixed GSM Modem. It accepts as its inputs the standard GSM AT command set as well as Nokia specific AT commands. We used standard GSM AT commands to ensure compatibility of our software with other vendors. The MT interfaces with the USB port of the PC. The PC software was written in MS VB and didn’t contain advance features such as request queuing. Database used for demonstration was MS Access and was queried using SQL commands. Current Status
The system was demonstrated to be working, and was subsequently used as a basis for the information system developed for the National Games 2002.
Send result of query to sender