Schoolspace
(Personal project)
Back in high school, I founded a school management software company. The first concept was automating attendance using NFC cards. Over the years, the idea evolved with a few iterations. Eventually I landed on using ultra-wideband tags and receivers to ensure students were present while maintaining general location privacy.
I wanted to turn this into a full-time startup with one of my friends. I was selected by an incubator out of Austin, Texas to take part in their first cohort. We went through a few product development cycles together over the course of a year or so. After doing some demos with some school administrators, teachers, and students it became clear that this technology was better suited elsewhere. Schools would likely be unwilling to pay for technology to solve this problem, since more accurate attendance data could reduce state funding to the school.
One of the more exciting and fun exercises was thinking about some of the useful tools you could build around ultra-wideband technology. Given that a UWB tag has about 200 meters of range, it could be combined with GPS data to precicely locate a classroom, especially in a college with large campuses or schools with rotating classrooms.
I built a few prototypes for this functionality and ultimately landed on something very similar to how Apple handles tracking AirTags in the "Find My" app. Once you get close enough to the classroom, a floating arrow points you towards the location with dots that indicate the level of closeness.
Understandably, teachers and administrators were never excited about adopting new technology. To make setup simple, I designed some different concepts for room setup. The most user-friendly implementation used the phone's LIDAR scanner to create room boundaries based on a 3d mapping of the walls and UWB scanner placement. Not every phone has this capability, so I designed another solution that used the phone's location to mark two diagonal anchor points at opposite corners in the room. These points were used to determine the room’s boundaries relative to the scanner.
I wanted a solution that wouldn't require students to install yet another app on their phone. This is why I was so attached to using physical NFC cards and UWB tags. The app for students was simple and functional; it helped students navigate to classrooms and view their attendance record.
