ABSTRACT

 Tracking systems is a concept that has been a part of human activity since the early 1900’s. Its existence has solved many problems ranging from enforcing efficient payrolls in a workplace to companies all around the globe complying with labor policies that restricts an employee from working beyond their stipulated time. Spanning beyond business and other corporate organizations, it plays a major role in academic institution which serves as the context this project work is based on. Tracking systems in this sector is mostly used to take note ofstudents attendance to class, save for the fact that the approach used to carry out this process is paper-based, meaning lecturers using paper to record students attendance, which poses a lot challenges including, unauthorized access to attendance records and inefficient use ofresources. The goal ofthis project is to design and develop a web-based application for managing and tracking student attendance in educational institutions. This application is basically a prototype, implying that the full implementation of the application as well as its integration with an existing academic institution will not be covered within this work. This project is driven by the desire to propose a simple way by which students presence or absence in class can be tracked in the most efficient and secure way. An automated, user-friendly interface is intended to take the place ofmanual attendance systems, being the conventional approach taken in most academic institutions. It uses a powerful database management system and role-based authentication for precise tracking and safe attendance record preservation. Methodologies employed in this work includes the agile and waterfall methodologies. The final result ofthe application was a successful design and development a webbased application prototype that takes note ofthe attendance percentage of students to class. The challenges encountered includes financial, as well as balancing the project work process and school lectures. This work is recommended for future research to improve the overall process of tracking student’s attendance and make a positive paradigm shift in the world oftracking systems