Design and Implementation of an Automated Class Attendance System for Educational Purposes

This research was conducted in order to easily get the attendance of the students at the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The research technique used in the project is Design Base Implementation Research (DBIR) and it is a combination of hardware and software system. The main purpose of this research is to reduce the time taken by the existing student attendance system on a paper or via calling the name of the students and to increase the efficiency of the attendance system. Thus, it aims that the time spent by the lecturer for the attendance taking to be effectively acquired in teaching and the taking attendance to be more accurate. The developed system uses a microprocessor called Raspberry Pi. For the project, RC 522, which is a radio frequency identification (RFID) reader, and liquid crystal display (LCD) used. In addition, the application code for the Raspberry Pi is written with Python 2.7 programming language. This project contains five different phases. The first one is that the student read his/her card to the system. The second operation is the person's information which is processed by the system and the message is displayed on the LCD screen either as an error message or success message. The third operation is the transfer between Raspberry Pi and the server. The fourth operation is the server process where the database is available. With the information read from the card, attendance is also recorded to the Relational database management system (RDBMS) if it meets the requirements. Finally, the fifth process is web based management application that is available to student, teacher and administrators. The web-based application is developed using the HTML, PHP and JavaScript programming languages. This project offers an automated attendance system, which is faster and reliable, alternative to the current traditional methods of taking attendance at EMU.