Despite advances in the electronic age, class attendance is still an important aspect of learning. In addition, it is important to be able to match names to faces, add comments about students during the semester for assessing student achievement, etc. Many academic institutions now provide instructors with an electronic copy of their class listings. Given these listings, the goals for the software system to be demonstrated are as follows. Before the first meeting, set up the class database in less than 10 minutes, to include all of the dates for the class meetings.
Updates are equally easy.
Then, at the start and, if desired, end of each class meeting, take attendance in less than 1 minute. Students seem to take visual attendance taking on a computer more seriously than manual attendance taken on paper. Introduction One complaint in the increasingly information-oriented computer age is that people become just numbers, or, perhaps, just names. But, today, computer technology has advanced to the stage that it is cost-efficient to use imaging technology to improve the situation to the point that people are more than numbers or names. Images of students provide a nice way to put faces to names.