Advice for using barcodes for youth program attendance

[pvdstudentunion]

Hello Airtable folks! I’m looking for advice on what is probably a much easier problem than I’m making it out to be.

Providence Student Union is going to (1) make membership cards for its youth participants, with QR codes, and (2) print all the QR codes and names in a notebook. The idea is that when students attend a meeting, we want to:

1. Scan multiple codes, either the cards themselves or out of the book
2. Connect the code to “Student Name” record in a “Student” table
3. Add all the student names to a lookup field in a single event record in an “Attendance” table.

Example:

The issue we’re having is that Airtable iOS only scans one barcode at a time. And there don’t seem to be any obviously available barcode scan solutions for IFTTT or Zapier.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to convert multiple QR scans into records, and then link those to a single event record? Thank you!

[kelley_steen]

I’m not sure if this applies to you but it sounds like I am working on something very similar for attendance tracking for a community college. Our student id badges already bar codes on them. It could be they have just updated the bar code scanning functionality since January. My current method is the create a table for one event with one barcode column and one time stamp column. Right now it does look like each bar code does have to be scanned individually from the app but it works. after an event we are export the table as a csv to match up with student names by out erp software

[pvdstudentunion]

Really appreciate the response, Kelley!