Enrique Nieto Arranz - Classroom Attendance and Participation Tool

Challenges

Universities face persistent challenges with low attendance and passive student engagement. Manual attendance methods (e.g., paper lists, verbal roll calls) are slow and unreliable, consuming valuable class time. Furthermore, participation is limited to a small group of confident students, while others feel uncomfortable engaging publicly. A solution was needed to motivate both student profiles and to leverage the ubiquitous use of mobile devices in classrooms.

Solutions

A cross-platform mobile application was developed to allow professors to manage attendance through quick codes, monitor participation, and provide students with tools for both direct (raising hand) and indirect (written questions) engagement. The design prioritized inclusivity, making interaction accessible for both confident and reserved students. Material Design principles were applied to ensure usability and familiarity, supported by an architecture based on Ionic and Angular.

The project followed a structured, user-centered process.

Understanding of the context of use. 
Open interviews were conducted with professors and students to capture real classroom needs and frustrations.
Definition of requirements.
Requirements were defined for three core user types, professor, confident student, and reserved student.
Prototype design.
Design of low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes to quickly iterate through ideas and identify the best solution for the requirements.
Implementation.
The application was developed using Ionic, enabling deployment on Android, iOS, and web from a single codebase.
Validation and adjustments.
Usability tests and pilot trials were conducted in real courses, supported by SUS questionnaires, showing high satisfaction and positive outcomes.

Example of a User Flow and a Persona

Use case and persona developed for the project

Planning for development

Attendance Control

The professors can start sessions so the students can join these sessions to registry their attendance. To do this process as easy and fast as possible, the app provides a random code of 5 numbers to the professor when he starts the session, this code needs to be shared with the students in the room so they can introduce it in their apps and they can see how their participation is being registered.

Screenshot showing the class details with code for attendance in the professor app

Screenshot showing the system to register the attendance with code in the students app

Screenshot showing the list of attendance in the professor app

Direct participation

For the first type of students (confident students), we designed a participation system that allows them to virtually raise the hand in the app, so this desire of participation is reflected in the app of the professor and he can easily identify the name of the student when this rise the hand in the real world and register the participation. This registration of participation is notified to the students to make them known that the participation that they did was being taken into consideration. With this information, we tried to create this motivation in the student to keep participating in future occasions.

This participation can be triggered by the professor instead. The app of the professor offers a button to select a random user that is in the session, also different filters for the list of attendance are provided so he can personalise that randomisation for special cases. With this method, we also allow the possibility to the professors to discover students that are faking the attendance and they can manage this as they want.

Screenshot showing the session screen with hand raised up of the students app

Screenshot showing the list of attendance with the students that have title hand rised up in the professor app

Screenshot showing the pop up to manage a participation in the professor app

Screenshot showing the filter for the list of attendance int he professor app

Screenshot showing the system to treat expulsion in the professor app

Indirect participation

For the second type of student (reserved students) we designed an indirect system to participate, this system is a simplified version of an inbox, so the students can send questions to the professor in the app without the need to physically participate in the session and then the professor can review that questions, answer them and grade them. As we don’t want to overload with work to the professor we give them the decision of how to treat these questions, they can answer each of them or they can simply take into consideration the participation of the students and then answer all of them during the beginning of the next session.

Screenshot showing the system to ask a question in the students app

Screenshot showing the list of questions in the professor app

Screenshot showing the response of questions in the professor app