These Kenyan students have developed an app that nabs students and lecturers who miss classes

david nganga

May 12, 2018 12:49 PM

The new app will also notify parents that their children are attending or missing classes

A group of students in Kenya have invented a digital application that will help address cases of absenteeism among lecturers and students in universities.

The five third-year students from Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST) in Kakamega said the app detects faces of the lecturers by their staff numbers and students by their admission numbers then sends the information to the university portal.

“When students come for lectures, they use their smart phones to scan a code, which takes their identity and confirms their attendance,” Eric Kipkemboi told The Standard newspaper.

He added that the app, dubbed QR code, will also save the class representative the hustle of taking attendance list manually by calculating the percentage attendance of each student against the 75 per cent minimum class attendance rule.

Facial image

The QR code is read by an imaging device, such as a camera, and formatted by software using Reed-Solomon error correction until the image is appropriately interpreted.

“When the student’s facial image is captured by the mobile application at the time of the scan, the Mobile Module will then communicate the information collected to the Server Module to confirm attendance. It takes 30 seconds only," said one of the developers.

The application can also notify parents that their children are attending or missing classes. The school's head of Computing and Informatics said they have patented the invention.

david nganga