Recording Class Attendence

[Hashim_Warren]

My teachers need to record all the dates when a student is absent. We do not need to record present, just absence.

We also need to easily count all of the time a student has been absent

One way to do it is for me to make an attendance table. The teacher can select a date and then link to the student table with all students who were absent that day/

Back on the student table side I can count how many dates were attached.

Is there a better way to do this??? One that would not me require me to create a completely separate table for attendance?

[Fbc_Glencoe]

I’m also wondering how this can be done

[Mike_Eovino]

Just curious as to why you wouldn’t want a separate table for attendance? This seems like a perfect one (student) to many (attendance) relationship. Just what a relational database like Airtable was designed to handle.

To answer your question, you could create a column for every day in your student table, but now you’re using Airtable more like a spreadsheet.

[Hashim_Warren]

Just looking to male sure there’s not an easier, cleaner way to do this

[Mike_Eovino]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To relational DB fans (like me), it’s in a nicely structured one to many relationship. Airtable does a great job of hiding most of the messy stuff from you.

[Naomi_Hanvey]

I’m trying to find a good way to do this as well (for ballet classes). In a regular spreadsheet, I simply have a tab for each class I teach, with a list of students and a column for each date we have class. I mark the students present or absent. It’s really simple to set up and to use.

I’d like to transition to using Airtable because that way I can have contact information, injury history, and other information for each student recorded all in the same place, but I am having a hard time coming up with a way to track attendance across multiple classes that will be easy to use and view.

[Tuur]

Multiple classes sounds like views to me. :slightly_smiling_face:

[Mike_Eovino]

If you have students that take multiple classes, then I’d have a student table, a class table, and a student-class cross-reference table that assigns students to classes.

And to visualize them, @Tuur is right. You could have a view for class, but all of your data is nicely normalized so there’s no repetition.