PentaDelay is a Java software able to manage students delay in an autonomus way without use of personnel. The late student, using a bar code reader at the school entrance, can scan his / her identity document, and the software independently recognizes the student, records the delay and prints a paper to be presented to the teacher.
The old delay management system
The old delay management system worked as follows: at the entrance there was usually someone, who had the task of registering the late arrivals of the students. To record the delays, he used a small script written on MS Access where by entering the student's name and surname, the script records the delay by increasing a counter associated with the late student and filled in a paper that was manually printed by the personnel. The student entered the classroom with this paper, and the teacher recorded the delay on the electronic register. The problems related to this implementation were: use of personnel at the entrance, and a serious bug in this management system: if the operator inadvertently mistyped the student's name or surname, the system recognized him / her as a new student and the delays were reset (I assure you that it often happened xD). It was important to keep track of the number of delays as we only had 5 in a year.
The new delay management system
The new delay management system has been designed in such a way as to resolve these huge problems of the previous system.
First of all, the new system has an updated copy of all current students attending the school (database exported from the
electronic register at the beginning of each new year), and records delays by receiving the student's tax code as input (on the back
of the ID) in bar code format.
At the entrance to the school, a bar code reader has been installed, so that the late student scans the bar code on the back of
the ID, and the system autonomously recognizes the student, records the delay, and independently prints the ticket to be presented
in class to the teacher (all without staff personnel!)
Clearly the management system is a CRUD system (Create, Read, Update and Delete), therefore it is always possible to manually insert
or delete delays in case of malfunctions of the bar code reader.
