Dive Brief:
- An assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology has developed an app that can record student attendance for a classroom by snapping a photo.
- Zhaozheng Yin, who works in the pattern recognition field and teaches computer science classes, told Fast Company that he developed the app to save the time of taking a roll call each day of class.
- Yin has been awarded a National Science Foundation Innovation grant to try to link his app into learning management software.
Dive Insight:
Yin’s app is not yet publicly available. Facial recognition technology is already used to validate test-taking for online courses. To use the app, an instructor would scan images of all of the students in a class into his or her phone at the beginning of a semester. Then, for each day of class, the instructor would scan the room with the phone to capture the faces of the students in attendance. The facial recognition software would then match them up with the original images.