[2008] Teacher Gradebook - Attendance & Grades

[DroopyPawn]

I'm rewriting my teacher grade book setting up the basic structure of the program. In this version, I want to include a way to keep attendance.

So far, I've set up separate VB classes for Student, Assignment, and Course. I'll probably add another on for Parent, and access that from within the Student class (to keep up with a Student's parental info.)

Right now, I'm thinking about how to set up the attendance "array" for each student. I will only want to keep up with certain attendance states -
T for tardy
A for absent
X for "gone on school trip" like a ball game or field trip etc.
L for "gone to resource lab" - for special needs students
Maybe a couple of others that I haven't though of yet.

I'll need to keep a list of these attendance events, for each student, for each 9 weeks - one grading period being 9 weeks. Since there are only 45 days (usually) in a grading period, I could set up an array from 0 to 50 for each quarter for each student. Some of the array items would just be left blank. With today's fast computers, I don't think that would be a problem. Do you?

I'm just a little unsure how to set this up.

In my main program, when th 4th student is absent on the 10th day of the 1st NineWeeks, I want to do something like

Student(4).Attendance(1,10).Date = TodaysDate
Student(4).Attendance(1,10).AttendanceState = "A"

I'd also like to be able to querry which students were absent on a specific date, how many absences and tardies a student has for the 9Weeks or semester, or full year, etc. There may be other querries that I haven't though of too.

So basically, I'm just looking for suggestions on how to best implement all of this.

Oh yeah, I'll be using text files to store the data, not a database.

[wild_bill]

I would implement something like this

Class Student
 
    Private mAttendance As New Dictionary(Of Date, AttendanceNotes)
 
    Public ReadOnly Property Attendence() As Dictionary(Of Date, AttendanceNotes)
        Get
            Return Me.mAttendance
        End Get
    End Property
 
    Public Sub AddAttendanceNote(ByVal day As Date, ByVal note As AttendanceNotes)
        Me.mAttendance.Add(day, note)
    End Sub
 
End Class
 
Enum AttendanceNotes
    Present = 0
    Tardy = 1
    Absent = 2
    SchoolTrip = 4
    ResourceLab = 8
End Enum

[stanav]

Oh yeah, I'll be using text files to store the data, not a database.

Poor you... Why can't you use a database to store data? It'll make your life a whole lot easier.

[DroopyPawn]

...because I've never used a database in ANY program I've written. I wouldn't know where to start.

[wild_bill]

Have you used serialization in any of your programs?

[DroopyPawn]

I guess not. I don't know what you're talking about. What is it?

[wild_bill]

In a nutshell, it is saving your .NET objects to your hard disk, so you can recreate them at a later time. There is a lot of data supplied by microsoft on how to do this, as well as examples on the board. So do some searching, and reply back with questions. That being said, as Stanav mentioned, a DB would be great for saving data as well.

[stanav]

...because I've never used a database in ANY program I've written. I wouldn't know where to start.

In real world, hardly any company is still using text files to store data. And if you want be competitive on the job market as a programmer, you should and must know about databases. So it's a good time for you to start using one now...

[jwakeman]

I think they are a teacher...not a programmer.

[szlamany]

Don't forget DISMISSED - it's one of the standard trio of what can be marked for a student's attendance by a teacher (A, T, D).

Your X and L are really the "closure" codes for the attendance. The A, T, D are "evaluated" against what the student's office attendance is - and the resolution comes from that. For example - on a field trip, tardy to school, visiting the nurse and so on.

btw - you really want to use a database - with .Net you can use data controls that pretty much link directly to the table in the DB making all this array stuff just go away. Then you spend most of your time just making sure your user-interface works the way you want.

We develop and sell software to school districts - how large is your district??

[uaeXuae]

Good Luck in your program. I wish i could help :-).