COVID-19 Zero-Interaction School Attendance System

For decades, school attendance has an important role in determining student success and ensuring that students regularly come to classes. Traditionally, a sheet of paper and a pencil or pen is used to document school attendance at universities. In most cases, the professor would hand out a piece of paper to a student. This student would mark their presence on the paper sheet and pass it to the person sitting next to them. The piece of paper would then travel throughout the classroom until the final student received the paper. Finally, the piece of paper would be given back to the professor or the teacher's assistant, so they may take note of which student is present and which student is absent. In the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, this method of taking attendance poses a great risk to possible disease transmission. Everyone within the room would be touching the same piece of paper, and sometimes students may even share the same pen or pencil with their classmates. Everyone in the classroom, including the professor, would be at risk if one student were infected with the COVID-19 virus. This is attributed to the attendance method. This paper proposes a zero-effort, zero-interaction attendance method based on two aspects that are currently present in a typical classroom: access points and a student's Wi-Fi enabled devices (e.g., smartphones). Our research found this method to be a no-hassle attendance-taking method that pinpoints where a student is within the classroom, without the class suffering from any disruption in learning.