School's Out
December 26 2019
Download the whitepaperAnand Valavalkar
[email protected]
www.anandvalavalkar.com
Abstract. A purely electronic version of bus order tracking would allow students to view needed information without having to be physically present. A two sided website is the solution. This allows for an administrator to input the order of buses on his/her phone and students to view it instantly. This will greatly increase ease of finding buses for students.
1. Introduction
At the end of the day, students have to find their bus location from the mass of busses at their school. In the status quo, a teacher or administrator for the school has to hold a whiteboard with parking slots for the buses, writing in the bus numbers as they arrive. Students then have to go to the teacher to see where their bus is in the line. The current system also doesn’t allow for students to know which buses have left already, so they are left guessing.
What is needed is an electronic bus tracking system that allows students to know where their bus is in line and which buses have already left, all from their phones.
2. Form
The system would have two sides. A student facing website that only shows the needed information — current bus order and the bus numbers that have already left. The other side would be for the teacher or administrator that inputs the bus information into the website. This side would allow for a teacher to alter the dimensions of the parking spots and layout, as well as the bus numbers that fill those spots.
First, the teacher/administrator facing portal: the user is asked for the number of rows and number of buses per row, which, when submitted, creates the required matrix of rectangular text boxes representing buses. The administrator can input bus numbers into each text box which is sent to the database, filling that spot in the matrix. The user can also change numbers and delete numbers to represent the emptying and refilling of a particular bus parking spot. The user also is given a button to clear entire rows as a way to show the leaving of an entire row of buses. As buses leave, their numbers are put into a section titled, “Buses that have left.”
Next, the student-facing website: the student is only given information; they do not have the ability to change data. They can view the bus numbers in specific locations, as well as the numbers of buses that have left.
3. Method
There will be a admin registration and login where teachers can create an account with their school name, user ID, and password. Upon creation of admin account, a student website on a subdomain is created with the format https://domain.com/schoolname. This will allow for multiple schools to use the same website, and for different bus information to be served to different schools.
4. Conclusion
We have proposed a system for student bus order tracking with a scalable implementation. We started with a main issue in the status quo, which provides needed information in an unpractical and inefficient way, and decided that the best way would be to create a web interface for both students and administrators. The idea is robust in its simplicity. Students can view the information from anywhere without having to be physically by the bus rallying point constantly.