I have built three different point tracker programs for schools. These points trackers were integral parts of either the house team system or the SW-PBIS program at the school. Each of these three programs has been customized to the school’s needs, but they all were built on a few key concepts.
This was my earliest version of a point tracker. This iteration was in support of an SW-PBIS program, specifically awarding students for their good behavior outside of classroom. When I arrived at the school, they had implemented a school-wide token economy through checks written by the teacher to the student, who then had to carry the check to the office to deposit it into their account. This method was cumbersome and led to teachers not utilizing the system and students not cashing in their checks. Several of my students were actually using the checks as bookmarks because they were too difficult to turn in for actual rewards.
Over the summer, I wrote a website which used QR codes to allow teachers to award students directly through their phones. Students carried a QR code with them and teachers could scan that QR code, so they could award or spend their scholar dollars. This program led to a nearly 3000% increase in the use of the token economy system (as measured by awards given and rewards claimed) over the course of a single semester and continues to be used to this day. It also helped reduce a regular issue with attendance in the school.
Homeroom attendance was spotty and inconsistent prior to this system because homeroom attendance did not impact graduation, so students didn’t see the benefit of attending, only the consequences of skipping (which they felt were worth the cost). But by awarding scholar dollars for homeroom attendance, we were able to reduce skipped homerooms to nearly zero over the course of one year. Homeroom attendance at the school continues to be high, in large part because of the role this program plays in their token economy system.
RIS was using a Google Sheet to track their points, but it was difficult for students to see the live scores as house events were running. Additionally, there were concerns about allowing access to the spreadsheet to the student council in case they accidentally deleted something.
As the most important concerns were updating the view, this design focused on the graphical chart. The data entry was handled entirely within a pre-built solution, allowing me to concentrate development time on the most important part of the project. The site was first rolled out at our Knowledge Bowl just before Christmas break. With a team of students logged into the site to do data entry, we had a live chart of the rankings after each question as the knowledge bowl progressed. It really drove up the engagement and excitment in what is already an exciting day for the MS.
The Point Tracker that I built for SJA combined ideas from both of the previous two. While points would be awarded by individual teachers rather than house events, they still wanted a live tracker to use during their weekly assembly. To simplify management of the accounts, a single sign-on system was incorporated which prevents students from creating accounts while still allowing teachers to sign in easily. This also simplifies onboarding new ES teachers because accounts do not need to be created manually for them. This system has been an integral part of their House Team implementation and is used regularly.
Each of these tools has been built using Python3 and hosted on either PythonAnywhere or Heroku. For future development, I would likely migrate to a different language and tech stack, specifically a Clojure based deployment. This is because Clojure allows you to use the same language for the server and for the client, as ClojureScript is a version of the language that can be converted to JavaScript to run in the webpage.