SCHOOL REPORT DATABASE

I taught computing at an international school in Brunei.

When I joined the school, the student reports were Word documents on the school server. Only one teacher at a time could work on a student's report.

I volunteered to design a database with an interface, so that many teachers could work on the reports at once, and the data would be stored efficiently.

I made the first version of our school report database with Microsoft Access and Visual Basic.

The first set of reports were very simple - High School reports with just grades and a comment.

The teachers loved being able to enter their reports any time from any computer in the school. Over the next few years, teachers asked for more and more features, and more and more kinds of reports. Eventually all reports across the school (Early Years, Primary School and High School) were on the system.

Teachers wanted to see a photo of the student while writing the report, so I added that feature.

Teachers also wanted to be able to view all previous reports for a student as they wrote the new report, so I added an archive database which could be accessed right from the report writing interface.

Eventually the structure of the application consisted of 4 databases.

• teacher interface
• administrator interface
• current report data
• archive report data

Teachers also wanted to be able to enter their reports from home, so I learned to make interactive web pages and made a whole new system using IIS and SQL Server.

When I left the school, there were many kinds of Primary reports

and many kinds of Secondary reports.

There was a comprehensive interface for teachers

with report entry forms for Primary teachers

and many report entry forms for Secondary teachers.

There was an interface for printing all the different kinds of reports.

I created a comprehensive management interface, so the person who took over from me could administer the reports easily.

There was a management interface for Primary reports

and a management interface for Secondary reports.

As we stored more and more previous reports in the archive, we started to use data science to query the data for meaningful insights.

• Which students are attaining very high or very low results across all subjects?
• Which students are suddenly performing higher or lower than usual in one or more subjects?
• Which teachers are producing much higher or lower results than other teachers?

I helped the school maintain the database for several years after I left, then eventually the school decided to migrate to a commercial solution.

I was very proud of the complete student report application we developed together!