SMS Gateway and barcode technology for presence of students in SMK Unggulan Terpadu PGII Bandung: A case study

Students in Indonesia have been cutting classes for some time now and it has become a bad habit. They leave their house towards their educational institutions, either school or college, but in fact, they go somewhere else. The issue was supported by the lack of communication between the school and parents related to student attendance. Dealing with the problems mentioned above, it is needed to create an SMS Gateway application for student presence as a solution. Application-based student presence SMS Gateway was made to ensure that students attend classes, by steps as follow: firstly, students must hand in the ID card to the teacher on duty, the teacher will then scan the barcode printed on the card, and finally the data will be recorded and be saved in the database automatically. The data will be saved automatically every day, and then it will be sent personally to their parents who had their mobile phones registered to receive information regarding their children presence at school on the particular date and hour. In addition, this application provides service for the parents to find the information on weekly and monthly basis. This application can also be a part of consideration in decision making for the principals by downloading student attendance data in Microsoft Excel file format. The implementation of the applications based on SMS gateway for students presence at school was expected to be a solution for the problems of student absence due to skipping school. This application has been tested in SMK Unggulan Terpadu PGII Bandung with very satisfying results and the level of student absence was able to be fixed.