20 September 2015 Updates

The progress we have made thus far on this project consists of open consideration of a few of the more obvious problems that we might encounter.

Ethically speaking, by producing a system that requires an ID for attendance verification, students may be able to lend their ID to a classmate to check them in and out of class. We have decided that such an action is virtually identical to telling someone the last four digits of your student ID and falsifying a signature on an attendance sheet, and is therefore not a significant concern.

Further in ethical examination, we briefly considered future development beyond potential classroom use: as there is no doubt already a use for this sort of technology being utilized for common, secure, or secret access to facilities or spaces, we have also deemed that this consideration can be given extremely low priority. Indeed, at the most extreme, we can only advise that any consumer of the product that would ultimately result from this project exercise reasonable caution in implementing it.

As far as application issues, we deemed that more research would be important. We are not yet certain how RFID is applied. Due to this fact, we are not sure how detection occurs, whether walls are sufficient to eliminate signals, or whether there is a direct line of sight needed; our preference is to develop a product that eliminates the need to consciously examine attendance during the day.

Our next task to set upon is that of beginning research to better understand the work we have ahead of us. We will need to research RFID technology in general, as well as determine the best coding language to utilize in order to integrate RFID, wireless communication, and a database that instructors will be able to access to analyze attendance information.