Thoughts Decoded

Initially, when I was assigned to the Vikramshila project and realized it was going to be just Sameer and me, I was extremely intimidated!! Never before had I worked on project with just 2 people. I realized this was going to be a lot of responsibility, but I was still enthusiastically looking forward to the challenge.

The purpose of the Vikramshila project was to create an application that would handle and organize the educational and health records of students from a school run by the NGO, Dasra.

We decided that the technology we would use would be core Java and Swings and as the database, an Excel sheet. POI seemed like a logical approach, so that the user’s machine could use the application independently of Microsoft Office. The main idea of the project was to create a report generation tool, which would create a variety of reports from a suitable Excel sheet.

The reports we designed were:

1. Full Child Report:

On selection of a particular child, it displays all the information for that child.

This information includes personal, scholastic & non-scholastic assessment, attendance and family statistics.

2. Scholastic & Non-Scholastic Report

Shows assessments for students’ performance in each scholastic or non-scholastic subject.

Shows the effect of language study on other subjects.

Shows the effect of teaching non-scholastic subjects on scholastic subject results.

This report can also be viewed as a break-up according to religion & monthly family income.

3. Progress vs. Background Report

Shows scholastic & non-scholastic results and assessments for each child.

Can also be viewed as a break-up according to religion, monthly family income & parents’ occupation.

4. Children in family vs. School going Children Report

Shows the number of children in each family and the corresponding number of school going children.

5. Monthly Attendance Report

Shows month wise break-up of students’ attendance.

Can also be viewed as a break-up according to religion & monthly family income.

6. Religious and Economic Report

Shows break-up of students according to religion and also according to monthly family income.

Since we use an Excel sheet as a source of input, we have configured the application such that the user can choose which Excel sheet will be the input. If the Excel sheet has all the required columns, the application will read from this sheet and generate the reports.

All in all, working on this project was an entirely new and exhilarating experience, both for the level of tasks I was assigned as well as for the contents of the project.