SIMS 'Attendance Race'

[Mark_Norton]

Hi there,

 

Not sure this is the correct place to be posting this but I'm a bit stuck in the mud on this one.

 

The attendance officer at my college came to me asking whether or not there was a way to take the attendance records of pupils from SIMS and link them to an animation. She would like the animation to show the different mentor groups racing to have the most attendance at the end of every week/month/term/ETC. In an ideal world she wants something where she can push a button at the end of the week, it takes the information from SIMS and then moves the animated runners to corresponding places on the racetrack depending on how much attendance that mentor has. Whether that be forwards or backwards (If a mentor group does worse one week, they should be able to go backwards) this animation would be played throughout the school and would showcase the different year groups' mentors on different days. EG: Year 7 mentors on Monday, Year 8 Mentors on Tuesday, ETC.

 

The idea behind this 'attendance race' between mentors is to get the kids to attend college more regularly with the notion of beating the other mentors.

 

My response to this was 'I've never heard of any software that can link both SIMS and an Animation together at the push of a button but I can find out for you' - Hence why I am here.

 

If any of you know a way of doing this or a piece of software that you can use it'd be much appreciated, having never really used SIMS before I'm quite out of ideas.

 

TL;DR: Software that takes SIMS records and makes an animated 'race' to get kids to attend more?

 

Cheers.

[3s-gtech]

That would be possible with custom software, depending on your abilities. You could use CommandReporter to pull out the attendance data for the groups (I believe that's a fairly standard report) into an XML file. This would then be parsed and the data could be placed into a database like MySQL. An animation to show the various data sets could probably be done using some stock web bar chart software to save on that part (a race animation would need to be built from the ground up I suspect), but it's a fair amount of work and would need some expertise.