Digitalizing spreads actively across the industries and our goal is to facilitate this by developing engaging and easy-to-use software. As the pandemic broke, the need for digitalization has soared. In light of this, we received an inquiry to develop a digital school administration solution to gain full control of academic activities.
In our client’s school, separate managing tools were used for reports, schedules, logbooks, and class registers. The purpose was to unite those tools in a single convenient platform to simplify the process of handling massive workflow.
The client provided us with those tools that were outdated, design requirements, limited budget, and extensive scope. So, we faced a real challenge.
We started the project with thorough research of the market and analyzing the existing school management system developments. To our surprise, we haven’t found anything resembling the app we needed. So, our solution with all its features and functionalities is deemed to be a unique one and comprised of automatic scheduling, digital school record books, and exam management. We have brought multiple systems together in a single platform. Let’s talk about them.
Automatic scheduling and Teaching plans
Making up a schedule is a complex administrative process. Schedule building algorithms aren’t available to the public. So, we have used a genetic algorithm and developed a unique automatic scheduling feature that looks like it was composed manually.
We’ve tried out several methods to develop the scheduling system that will be able to equally distribute teachers’ and students’ workload, draw a new schedule daily, and take into account teachers’ days off, weekends, and public holidays. Another thing that significantly complicated the development was an editable schedule. Working through various methods and technologies, we’ve come up with a solution that reckons with the overwork / non-completion of teachers. Also, we made it possible to copy the annual schedule into the current schedule, modify it, and save it as annual.
Electronic school record and analytics
The electronic school record is an easer-friendly system with features to manage school workflow and analyze processes. On our platform, we enabled checking grades of a student, class, or the school in general or checking the statistics of a teacher or a school subject. Also, we’ve built the feature to check the academic performance flow in different periods. We’ve introduced access rules for different groups, access levels, attendance records, and discipline notes.
Exams management
The biggest challenge we faced when we were developing this functionality was the ability to assign teachers and examined classes. That was needed to keep away a coincidence between the teacher and their class to be examined and distribute the workload. In the end, the algorithm functions in a way where it matches the classes and the teacher for upcoming exams, barring the examiners who have been teaching the class throughout the term.
“Quick launch”
Integration of new software requires big amount of data to be transferred, too. We’ve made this process as simple as possible by constructing a quick and convenient tool for data export and import. The process is shaped the following way: the students’ cards are to be drawn automatically when an Excel document with the students’ list is downloaded.
We’ve hand-crafted an MVP of SaaS solution for various user roles: school administration staff, teachers, students, and parents. The platform has been localized in two languages: English and Arabic. The perspective of this MVP is limitless. The product is scalable, up-to-date, secure, accepts heavy user load, and is wrapped up in fast, user-friendly, self-intuitive, and smooth design graphics and animations.
