Mathematical Sciences and Informatics Journal

Vol. 2, No. 2, Nov. 2021, pp. 89-101

http://www.mijuitmjournal.com DOI : 10.24191/mij.v2i2.16123

Mobile Class Attendance System (MobCAS)

This is an open access article under a Creative Commons

Nurul Hafizah Zainal Abidin
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Faculty of Computer and(CC
License Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Perak Branch Tapah Campus,
BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Malaysia
[email protected]

Muhammad Ridhwan Muhamidon

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Perak Branch Tapah Campus,
Malaysia
[email protected]

Bushra Abdul Halim

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA Melaka Branch, Alor Gajah
Campus, Malaysia
[email protected]

Roslah Arsad
Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Perak Branch Tapah Campus,
Malaysia
[email protected]

Article Info ABSTRACT

People nowadays choose to use mobile applications in their daily
Article history: tasks. Due to COVID19 pandemic, students and lecturers faced a new
Received June 12, 2021 challenge in learning and teaching, which have to be conducted online.
Revised Sept 15, 2021 One critical issue in online and distance learning is to monitor the
Accepted Oct 15, 2021 students attendance. Google meets has been widely used but few
problems emerged such as limited in notifying absenteeism.
Therefore, this study aims to develop a smartphone application called
Keywords: MobCAS that can be used to record student attendance and to
Mobile Application calculate the percentage of attendance automatically for reporting the
Student Attendance absenteeism. This mobile application was created on the Android
University Students platform and communicates with a webserver using phpMyAdmin as
phpMyAdmin the database platform. This paper provides the fundamental design
MySQL Database and implementation of MobCAS. The results from users survey
indicated that the system is easy to operate, effective and acceptable
to use in the future.

Corresponding Author:
Nurul Hafizah Zainal Abidin,
Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences,
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Perak Branch, Tapah Campus
Perak, Malaysia
Email: [email protected]

1. Introduction
Educators encountered new challenges when classes were transformed from face-to-face
into online and distance learning. One of the challenges is to ensure that all students to attend the
class on the schedule time. The best approach to get full attendance in class is by using a
mechanism that can notify the student absenteeism. In most of universities in Malaysia, monitoring
student absenteeism is a compulsory to avoid the students being barred of their final examination.
Lecturers can utilize many software tools to support the online teaching and learning
implementation. As for examples, many of them are commonly used Google Classroom[1], Google
Meet[2] and Microsoft Team[3]. Nevertheless all of these tools are merely depending on email
account without any connection to the registered student database. It created a difficulty for the

This is an open access article under a Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
lecturer to manage the students attendance when the username of the email is different with the full
name of the student. Although an online learning management system[4] is provided by the
university to be used by the lecturers and students, this system is commonly abandoned with a lot
of system functions that mostly have a performance and low connection issues[5]. Therefore, a
very light weight system that particularly customized for the university requirement of attendance
management system such as a mobile attendance system is useful for the lecturers and students.
This paper provides the report of study that focused on the design and development of a
class attendance system based on mobile application technology that can be deployed in an Android
device. Named as MobCAS, the system was customly designed in accordance to the Universiti
Teknologi MARA(UiTM) rule regarding to the final examination barred if the students were not
attending at least 80% of the classes for each subject.
There are two main objectives of this study, which are to to develop a mobile application for
students class attendance and to calculate the percentage of student absenteeism in the mobile
application. The proposed design and development introduced in this paper is useful to be replicated
by the inexpert system developers who intend to produce a mobile application mainly related with
class attendance and management.

2. Literature Review
Development of mobile application (mobile apps) technologies is a significant project due to
the high demanding needs. Mobile apps typically available through several application distribution
platforms or application store and operated by the owner of the mobile operating system such as
App Store distributed by iTunes, Google Play distributed by Google and BlackBerry App World
distributed by BlackBerry. A mobile platform or mobile operating system (OS) is a set of programs
that runs on a computer or mobile devices. Mobile OS are seen in smartphones powered by the
Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, BlackBerry OS, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and many more[6]. IOS
was developed by Apple Inc and this operating system distributed exclusively for Apple hardware
such as iPhone, iPod and iPad. Apple products gives a good feeling and exclusivity and not become
sluggish in performance even after installing apps but most of the mobile apps for IOS are not free.
Meanwhile, Windows Mobile OS developed by Microsoft Corporation used for PCs, mobile devices,
and Xbox. The advantages of Windows Mobile OS is its convenience to be used by many type of
users. Blackberry OS is an operating system developed by BlackBerry Ltd and only support for
Blackberry devices. The advantages of Blackberry are easy typing because most blackberry still use
QWERTY keyboard, very fast and snappy. However, Blackberry has major problem with the battery
life, application support and associated with complex development platform for mobile
applications[7]. Application development on the Android OS, IOS and blackberry requires different
approaches, programming languages and has different methods of app publication[8]. However, the
most flexible approaches and widely acceptances by mobile apps users is Android OS[9].
Recently, a variation of attendance system have been introduced with different kinds of
attractive features and technologies. Researchers in [10], presents the design and architecture of
mobile application for student attendance that was integrated with mark management system. The
system need to be integrated with marking management as the attendance percentages need to be
calculated with the students final grading. Different in the mobile attendance system proposed by
[11], the researhers incorporated image recognition technology to automate the attendance records
by recognizing the students’ face. Similarly, based on image processing technology, bio-metric
fingerprint authentication for Android based attendance vigilance system has been developed in [12].
As to get parents involvement in their child’s school attendance, mobile application with SMS
gateway has been developed by researchers in [13]. Furthermore, by using a combination of QR
code and GPS technology, a location-aware of event attendance system has been implemented for
speeding up the process of taking students’ attendances in the Universiti Teknikal Malaysia
(UTEM)[14]. Firebase database in cloud was used to manage the attendance information of this
system. There are several database platforms suitable for mobile apps can be used other than
Firebase such as SQLite, Oracle Database Lite and MySQL. Firebase is more powerful for updating
data in realtime but MySQL is more flexible to works on many programming languages including
PHP, PERL, C, C++ and JAVA as well as useful and efficient to handle a large databases[15].

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3. Methodology
The research process is separated into four phases: data collection, design and
development, implementation, and evaluation. The first phase was to collect the data set of degree
students in UiTM Tapah, detail of classes and lectures.
The second phase involved two important tasks namely the database design and the
application development. MySQL Database has been used as the database platform as it is
compatible with Android Studio for the mobile apps platform. Next development was the mobile
application interfaces. A function to calculate the percentage of student absenteeism has been
incorporated in the application.
After completing the application development, three important tasks were implementation
and functional test. The first testing was to ensure that the function to record the students'
attendance is correctly stored in the mobile application and the second testing is verify the
correctness of the percentage of student absenteeism. Figure 1 presents the flowchart of the
MobCAS that show each important process.

Figure 1. The MOBCAS flowchart

To use this system, users need to log in their lecturer ID and password for authentication. If
the authentication process failed, the system is unable to open the next interface. Then, next
interaface will appear to allow users to select class group and subject. The users can turn-in their
attendance for the allocation time slot and view the attendance list. At the same time, the system
will calculate the percentages of absenteeism, which also can be viewed by the users. Figure 2
shows the proceses of viewing absenteeism results.

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 Figure 2. Percentage of Students’ Flow Chart

The MobCAS system was evaluated by conducting a survey on users who were degree
students and a few of lecturers as to measure the system usability and to verify the accuracy of
absenteeism function.

3.1 The Development

This part describes the application development based on two development phase, namely
the development of database and development of the mobile application system.

3.2 The Database

The database structure of MobCAS is shown in Figure 3, developed by using phpMyAdmin.
It has seven tables that connecting student, course, lecturer, student_register, groups, attendance,
present_absent and timelist. A student can have more than one registration of subject and more than
one time of absent. A lecturer can have create different attendances for the specific subject along a
whole semester. The attendance table is a bridge between student group,course,timelist and
present_absent tables. Lecturers are separated into two categories: system administrators, who
have full access to the system, and lecturers who have limited access to the project. Examples of
data when stored in the database for student and lecturer tables can be depicted in Figure 4 and
Figure 5.

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Figure 3. Database structure of MobCAS

Figure 4. Example of data in student table

Figure 5. Example of data in lecturer table

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 The course Table store information about all subjects registered taken by the degree
students in UiTM Tapah. This table consists course code and course name as shown in Figure 6.
The timelist table lists all of the available learning durations based on the learning schedule as shown
in Figure 7.

Figure 6. Example of data in course table

Figure 7. Example of data in timelist table

The student_register table (refer Figure 8) stores information about students, courses, and
groups. Each student can enrolled more than one subjects, each with its own group or class. The
table provides the information required by the standard attendance form, such as the date and time,
lecturer information, and information on absent or present students. The list of pupils, however,
cannot be displayed in this table due to the (many to many) relationship. A bridge table was created
to address this issue. The table of present_absent as in Figure 9 used to store information about
students that are either absent (2) or present(1).

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 Figure 8. Example of data in student_register table

Figure 9. Example of data in present_absent table

3.3 The Interfaces

The main interfaces of MobCAS application are depicted in Figure 10. If the device is not
connected to an internet, a pop-up message will appear to inform the message error. Users must
enter their staff id and password to be verified before the next page is displayed, as shown in Figure
11. The administrator had to create a unique ID and password for the lecturers. The names and email
addresses of the lecturers will be displayed on the next windows after the login is successfully verified
with the correct username and password. Two buttons can be selected according to its function either
fill attendance or view percentage of absenteeism.

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 Figure 10. MobCAS main windows

Figure 11. Lecturer windows

If the lecturer chooses Fill Attendance, they need to select the course and group as shown
in Figure 12. In order to alter a student's status (present/absent) in the class, the lecturer must insert
a probable time, and click one by one until the end of the list of students. Before the next page to be,
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the information regarding attendance, such as date, time, and lecturer ID will be stored in the
database, indicating that the data for the class had been generated. Meanwhile, if View Percentage
was chose, users need to select the group and course. A list of students with their percentage of
attendance based on subject can be viewed as shown in Figure 13. After 14 weeks of study, if a
student's attendance does not surpass 80%, it is regarded unacceptable, and the student can be
warned.

Figure 12. Select course and group windows

Figure 13. List Name of Student and Their Percentage

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3.4 Connection between Database and MobCAS
A connection between the external database and MobCAS is important to ensure that the
system can be deployed. Therefore JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) parser has been used to
support the communication between the PHP and JAVA programs. Figure 14 depicts a segment of
the JAVA codes in an Android application.

Figure 14. Segment of JAVA Codes to connect with PHP

This codes is to allow the PHP codes (Refer Figure 15) to retrieve data from the phpMyAdmin
database. The PHP file uses Structure Query Languate (SQL) commands to connect, read and
manipulate data in the database. Data from the database will be transmitted to MobCAS using the
PHP codes as illustrated in Figure 16. The JAVA codes to accept data from a PHP file and to be
displayed in the MobCAS application are presented in Figure 17.

Figure 15. PHP codes to connect and retrieve data in the database

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 Figure 16. Information retrieved From the Database Wait for Java Response

Figure 17. JAVA codes

4. Results and Discussions

After implementing the system to be used by a few of lecturers and degree students who
registered in the Computer Science program in UiTM, Tapah branch, a survey was conducted to
measure the system usability. These users have used the system for two weeks and have to give
their perception on the system usability. The scope of usability has been explained to these users,
which include system ease of use, fast processing, user friendly and the accuracy of calculating the
percentage of absent. The users were categorized as competent Android users and have a basic
knowledge on developing a mobile application. Figure 18 is the pie chat to present the result of
survey.

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 Strongly Agree
30%

Agree
60%
Disagree
10%

Figure 18. Usability acceptance of users on the system

Based on their experienced on using the MobCAS application, most of the users were not
having problem in installing the application on their Android device. All the functions provided by the
system have works very good and information can be displayed fast. Therefore, as seen in Figrue
18, majority of them found that the system is useful and believed that the system is acceptable.

5. Conclusion
The MobCAS provides a paperless solution in collecting student’s attendance which can
minimize the misplaced attendance sheet. The automated student presence’s percentage also helps
the lecturers to observe their students attendance. However, there is a limitation where the lecturer
needs to clicks the student’s name sequentially to record the attendance. For future work, new
functions may be added in the system such as the student details or their academic report. It is also
suggested that there is a connection between the MobCAS and the current web portal of academic
system in UiTM.

Acknowledgment
The authors gratefully acknowledge the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Perak branch for giving
the authors the opportunity, support, and facilities to carry out this research project.

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