Design-Based Research Capstone

Classroom Presence System

Traditional classroom attendance systems typically rely on a single observation or event to determine whether a student is present, which can be inaccurate and inefficient in determining analytics of actual time in classroom. Our system is intended to provide continuous and accurate tracking of student presence.

Overview

The Problem	Attendance rarely reflects sustained presence. Tardiness, restroom breaks, counseling visits, and early departures all get flattened into a single present/absent mark, hiding how much instructional time a student actually gets.
Our Approach	Correlate multiple independent presence signals, device via RFID and person via camera, against the bell schedule and per-period enrollment to build a continuous presence model, not just a single daily checkmark.
Research Question	Can a low-cost Raspberry Pi–based UHF RFID system, using tamper-evident computer-mounted tags and doorway detection, reliably establish classroom device presence and contribute to student presence determination when correlated with an existing camera-spatial technology and class registration/bell-schedule data?
Current Phase	Phase 1, the contact-tap prototype, is working end to end. See Phases for the full roadmap.
Signals Correlated	RFID (device presence) + Camera (person identity), reconciled against Bell Schedule (attendance window) and Registration (per-period roster).

System Architecture

Two independent event sources, RFID and camera, feed a correlation engine that is also aware of the bell schedule and per-period enrollment.

flowchart TD
		BS[Bell Schedule] --> CP[Class / Period]
		CP --> REG["Registration:
Student + Face + Computer + RFID Tag"]
		REG --> RFID["RFID System
Front door / Back door / Room"]
		REG --> CAM["Camera System
Spatial presence, face-scanning system"]
		RFID --> CORR[Correlation / Intelligence Engine]
		CAM --> CORR
		CP -. expected enrollment .-> CORR
		BS -. attendance window .-> CORR
		CORR --> PRES[Attendance / Presence State]

This is the target architecture the team is building toward across four phases; the current prototype implements the leftmost slice of it. Full detail, including the presence-state machine and data model, is on the Technical Detail page. Design rationale and a literature review of comparable systems, confirming this approach against prior work, is on the Project Summary page.