Student time tracking?

[KennyG]

We are looking for a solution to track the number of hours each student is working each week.

Most time tracking packages are fee based or don't really fit our simple requirements.

Outside of an excel spreadsheet or a sign in/out paper what is everybody else using?

Thanks!

[meg]

At 900, we had the same issue a few years ago. We got so big that spreadsheets just weren't managable.

I developed our own time logging system, and we've open sourced it. Each user gets an ID and they can log in with that. We have a raspberry pi set up with a monitor and barcode scanner, so each of our members swipes a barcode as they come in or leave. You could also use a keyboard and type it in.

The code can be found here: https://github.com/FRC900/timesheet. You may need to make some modifications to the config files for your team's requirements. If you have any questions, feel free to message me for my email address (I'm more reliable about checking that).

[MechEng83]

We started out with an excel sheet, but that ran into the problem of having a single point of sign-in/sign-out. When our team started to grow to 60 kids, we had to come up with another solution. I "coded" up a google doc spreadsheet so we now have multiple computers for kids to log in.

[Lij2015]

My Alma Mater uses a finger print scanner with a computer application that was written by our programming mentor.

The application stores the student's fingerprint and you scan when you come in and scan when you leave. Makes the process from the student's prospective super easy.

[Cecil]

We use an application called TimeTrex Community Edition (if you Google their SourceForge page, you can bypass the unwanted spam emails). It is set up more for a business with a payroll, but it can work just fine with just the timesheet set up. It also does nice reports on who is in/out, how many hours have been worked per student, etc.

[LittleJoe]

Our team Uses an online service called Open Time Clock, which is made especially for groups of people to clock in and out on a regular basis.

here's their site: https://www.opentimeclock.com/

[adammiller3122]

Originally Posted by Cecil

We use an application called TimeTrex Community Edition (if you Google their SourceForge page, you can bypass the unwanted spam emails). It is set up more for a business with a payroll, but it can work just fine with just the timesheet set up. It also does nice reports on who is in/out, how many hours have been worked per student, etc.

As do we! I love it!!! I absolutely love the reporting in it. I love that you can create a report with just about anything on it. It really has saved our team a lot of time!

[guniv]

We use an app called SwipedOn for the iPad. The app itself looks nice and is extremely simple. It's really handy for us to make sure students have left the lab, when they left, how they left, and for seeing who is in during a meeting.

[Mr_I]

We use a Windows app that we (okay, I) wrote some years ago. Students enter their ID numbers, and it logs when they sign in or out, displays who's currently in, keeps track of total hours (or hours over a given span of time, like Build Season), etc. While not typically required, I even let parents / mentors use it to document their time / volunteer hours for their employers.

(A neat feature to encourage students to accurately log out - if it detects a work shift of more than 10 hours, it flags it as "suspicious", and records only 1 minute of time. The admin then can declare it valid and record the full time, or adjust it to a more realistic log out time. 8^)

[James Juncker]

At 2834 we still use an Excel Spreadsheet that we are easily able to add more students in (currently 40 + our old members and alumni being another 20) we haven't had an issue with sign in time taking too much time. What we do to make the process faster is use a barcode scanner to scan our students numbers into the system taking about .5 seconds to log in or out.

When the system was made by our old coach he wrote quite a few macros for excel and that was what he knew how to work with. we don't foresee switching from Excel anytime soon as its going to be able to accommodate for what I would say about 60 students. (our mentors and parents are also in the system as well with custom printed barcodes (i.e. a laminated card with the barcode 00000001) but they rarely sign in so the system has a list of over 80 people that could log in at any time.) I may try posting this here later if anyone would like to attempt to use it.

[KennyG]

Thank you everyone for the feedback. I was hoping to create something that plugged into Slack but we just couldn't get around the problem of students logging in when not on site.

It looks like the SwipedOn app would work well for us.