The Assembly school in Lisbon positions itself as a pioneer technology education institution aiming to prepare future professionals in Portugal for a technology-driven world. Recognizing the limitations of traditional education in adapting to the rapidly evolving technological landscape, Assembly offers a unique learning methodology, especially aimed at teaching children and adolescents. This approach allows students to tailor their education according to their interests and strengths, focusing on essential tech skills like coding, robotics, and design.
However, the current system for managing student activities presents several chal- lenges that are increasingly becoming untenable for a growing institution like Assem- bly. Teachers have to manually mark students’ attendance and activities on Excel sheets, which are then allocate points to students. Students subsequently record their gaming times on sheets of paper when requesting gaming equipment, and administrators must then transfer these records to a different Excel sheet. This manual process is not only in- efficient and prone to errors, but it is also difficult to manage, lacks scalability and doesn’t fit the idea of what Assembly is meant to be. As Assembly continues to expand, the limita- tions of this outdated system become more pronounced, underscoring the urgent need for a scalable, automated solution that can efficiently handle the institution’s growing needs.
The proposed solution is an automated point management system at Assembly School consists of two main components: Odin and Heimdall. Odin is a server/web application that serves as the central hub for managing student activities, points, and class information working with a backend API and a frontend SAP application. Heimdall is a custom- made point-tracking system designed to monitor and log computer usage, designed to be deployed in all of the relevant computers and feed collected data to a data store. Odin and Heimdall communicate via a Non Relational Data store where Heimdall publishes its logs to and Odin consumes, process and adds the relevant information to the main database. The usage of the frontend application and the API requires authentication via an Office 365 account, using a Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism. This requires the use of an external authentication server provided by Microsoft.