Student Mentoring

An Android application built to record and monitor students' performance in a college.

Problem

Context

• In most of the schools there is some sort of mentoring system that is implemented.
• A mentor's responsibility is to offer advice, provide support and answer questions of his mentees.
• Each mentor can have a set of students' as his mentees every semester.
• A mentor usually will have to interact with every one of his students and have to record their performance every semester.
• This data lets future mentors understand the students' ability better and help them accordingly.

Limitations

• Initially this task is done on paper where each student has a file which moves from one mentor to another every semester.
• This discourages data visualizing since the only thing a new mentor sees will be a bunch of numbers that are hard to make sense out of.
• Another problem in this system is to maintain privacy, confidentiality and transparency at the same time.
  • A student must be able to view his performance and feedback, while this data must be hidden from other students.
  • Similarly, every mentor must be able to record and monitor the performance of only those students who are assigned to him.
  • This is very difficult to maintain with a paper based system.

Addressing the problems with the app

Roles and logins

• This app has two different modes of Login
  • Student Login
  • Mentor Login
    • Student Login and mentor login sample screens...
• When a mentor is logged in
  • He is welcomed with a Listview of all the students that are assigned to him.
  • On selecting a student,
    • the application navigates to the Student detail page, where mentor can
      • see the student's profile
      • see previous mentors' feedback
      • Add his feedback
    • This can be done for all the students that are assigned to the mentor
• Similarly, when a student is logged in
  • he can view his profile information and feedback given to him by his mentors.
• This addresses the problem of authorization and confidentiality since a mentor can only view/edit the data of his mentees and students' can view only their information when logged in.

Sample Student Profile

Graphs and stars

• When a mentor records students' performances in certain fields,

  • instead of viewing and entering numbers to rate a student's performance the app chooses the following modes of input and output

    • Input - Star view

    

    • Output - Graph View

      

• This solves the problem of Data visualization.

Tech Stack

The front-end of the application is an Android App while the backend(not included in the repo) was a XAMPP server with PHP and MySQL was used as the datbase.

Other Features

• Offline usage

  • Whenever a user is logged in, all the data is fetched from the server and is persistent on the local device.
  • Any new data that is added to the student's profile shall be temporarily stored on device and is updated to the server when online.

• Restrict mutliple logins

  • A mentor when logged in on one device, can not log-in on other devices.

• Data at a glance

  • Data is represented in the form of a histogram
  • Students/Mentors can view their progression over semesters in a single view.

Future works

• A dashboard to
  • appoint mentors and assign students to them.
  • Fetching (consolidated) data of past students when needed.
  • Generating reports on demand.
• Sending notifications to students whenever a new feedback is given.