Setting-up tap forms for tracking students

[Kit Johnson]

I brought the iPhone app yesterday after doing some research and finding everyone having positive things to say about Tap Forms. However I’m struggling a bit. I would like to know if it’s possible to do this:

1) Have a form with students and their contact details.

2) Another form for a course. E.g. “2015 semester 1, English Literature” On this form the teacher (me) can record attendance. Attendance is scored 2 for on-time, 1 for late, and 0 for absent. It needs to be quick and easy to quickly input all on-time students, and later during the class, all late students. (I have between 20 and 30 students per class, and I can’t be going into sub-menus to mark each individual student as on-time or late.)

3) Link forms 1) and 2) so that when I open the form to record attendance in today’s class (English literature), I only see a list of the students that are enrolled in this class. I don’t want to see my drama students in this list.

4) Calculate total attendance points for each student in the class.

So far, after about half a day experimenting with this app and reading tutorials on database design, I’ve managed just 1) and part of 2). On my course form I have ‘Linked to form’, students, many to many. And now I have a nice little checklist for ‘on-time’ and then another checklist for ‘late’. However I can’t see a way to create a numerical score for those entries, and can’t for the life of me see any way to achieve 3) and 4).

What I was really hoping for was a complete system where I could log assignment scores, reasons for absence, and even calculate grades. All this might simply be too much to ask from this iOS app, however.

Currently I am doing all of this successfully on iOS Numbers app. It works, but it’s clunky, and I was hoping a database would make things more robust.

[Brendan]

Hello Kit,

I’m so sorry for the delayed response to your question. I’ve been on holiday this past week and haven’t had a chance to respond to this one.

1. You can certainly have a form that keeps track of students along with their contact details. Please see the online user manual for information on how to create a new form. http://www.manula.com/manuals/tap-zapp/tap-forms-mac/3/en/topic/creating-a-new-form

2. See #3

3. You can link forms together by adding a Link to Form field type to your parent form. Use a many-to-many Link Type for this purpose. That way you’ll be able to select from the list of students that you want to link.

4. If you set the Calculation Type on a Number or Checkmark field, you can obtain the total of the values of that field across all of the displayed records.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Kit Johnson]

Hi Brendan,

Many thanks for your reply. No worries on the delay. There are actually so many questions I have, and partly it’s because I’m inexperienced with database design. So I really appreciate your help. Instead of trying to solve everything at once, I’ll just try to tackle one thing at a time. So…

I set-up a form called ‘Example Students’, for their personal details:

• Nickname
• Phone number

Then one called ‘Example Class’:

• ‘Date’ field
• ‘On time’ field
• ‘Late’ field
• Later I will add more fields, such as ‘very late’, or ‘excused absence’.

Now to link the forms.

• In ‘Example Class’ I did Link to Form > Example Students (Many to Many, Show Inverse relationship). This field is called ‘On-time’.
• I repeated that exacatly but with a field called ‘Late’. That’s enough for my demo.

This works fine for inputting attendance on any given class date. I just go to ‘Example Class’, do new record, set the date, and then click ‘On-time’ and then do the checklist of students who are on-time. I can repeat this process for any late students. (It would be ideal if the students I marked as ‘on-time’ didn’t appear on the checklist of ‘late’ students, but that might be asking too much.)

I can now see at a glance for a given date how many students are present and late. Good. So I record attendance for a whole semester. But when it comes to the end of semester I want to be able to go into the ‘Example Students’ Form, select a student, and see how many times they were present, how many times they were late, and calculate a ‘Total Attendance Percentage’ score.

I’ve read your reply several times, and I’ve read the manual, but I just can’t see a way to do that. Would you be able to advise on this please? If my explanation isn’t clear, I can send screenshots and give more details.

[Brendan]

Hi Kit,

If you email me your parent form template and a screenshot with some markup of what you want to achieve, I could take a look at it for you. But at the moment I don’t think you’ll be able to calculate the Total Attendance Percentage unless you have a Attendance Percentage for each Student that you could then total up at the bottom of the Link to Form field’s table view.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Kit Johnson]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks very much for the offer. I’m quite busy at the moment so can’t reply properly, but I just wanted to say thank you for that, and when some time opens up I’ll give it some more thought.

Kit

[Author]

Posts