STUDENT ATTENDANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM USING RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION (RFID)

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of Study

The accessibility of virtually all material on the World Wide Web nowadays have make students less encouraged to come to lectures than ever before (Hornback et al 2005) and lecturers are worried about student erratic class presence. Checking students' class attendance is one of the vital concerns for universities and colleges, because many universities and colleges calculate students’ attendance while giving the final grade for a semester (Nurber & Selim, 2012).

Administrators or lecturer with a large lecture room may find the hassle of having the attendance sheet being passed around the class and the manual signing of attendance by students are burdensome and most likely distract them from teaching and getting full attention from the students (Gatsheni & Kuriakose, 2007).

An attempt to solve the above problems, brought about the motivation to research on how to design a system that record attendances of students as well as controlling impersonation among students during lectures and examination  automatically.

The proposed system is built using Radio Frequency Identification technology.

This project is aimed at presenting an intelligent Radio Frequency Identification student attendance management system around Federal University of Technology Minna so as to meet up with Nigeria University 70 percent course attendances before a student can seat for that courser examination.

The application of Radio Frequency Identification Technology to student class attendance checking problem will eliminate time wasted in signing of attendance sheet and roll call method of attendances taking use by most lecturers in FUT minna.

1.2 Statement of Problem

Virtually every lecturers within the various departments in FUT Minna, still uses the normal technique to record student attendance by passing attendance sheet to student to write their names and sign. By using this strategy, truant students will ask their course mate to write down their names when they are absence from that class instead of taking permission from the lecturer, lecturers have to analyst the attendance sheet to record who was absent and who attend the lecture. In the event that the lecture miss place the attendance sheet, he will have to take the class attendance again which is a stressful and time consuming process. Checking students' by roll call which involves calling the students’ surname and marking presence or absent may take roughly around 12-15 minutes out of every lesson time.

This project work intend to solve the following problems:

a.    Eliminate or reduce the quality time lost through manual checking of student attendance as well as control impersonation among students

b.   Eliminate the manual process of analyzing the attendance sheet to record student class percentage.

c.    The possibility of a courser lecturer losing his attendance sheet or forgetting to come along with it to class will be eliminated 

1.3 Aim and Objectives

Students Attendance Management System is aimed at implementing a system that aids lecturers of Federal University Technology Minna record the number of student’s attendance automatically as well as controlling impersonation among students during lectures and examination respectively using Radio Frequency Identification technology.

The main objectives of this project are to:

1.To explore the challenges existing with the manual system and infer solution.

2.Design and Implement a fully automated system that will record student class attendance

3.To test the functionality of the design by using the program to test 20 students.

1.4 Significance of Study

This project will be beneficial to lecturers and administrators of Colleges and University around the world with large number of students per class and still uses the manual method of taking students class attendance by roll call or signing attendance sheet