Attendance Tracker – Project Notes

What this is

This project is to build a Google Meet attendance tracker. We already have a partial working version (Attendance_Template_v3). Check it out for reference:

• Open the file
• Go to Extensions > Apps Script
• You’ll see the current logic (written in JavaScript, but pretty readable even if you know Python)

Working with a team

We’ll use GitHub Projects to track and manage tasks.

All development will happen inside this repo, so it’s important to follow a few collaboration rules:

• Always create and work on your own branch
• This helps us review code before merging into main
• It also prevents us from accidentally overwriting each other’s work
• Place your working notebook(s) in: src/notebooks/
• When your branch is ready, open a pull request so others can review and discuss before merging

Following this workflow keeps the project organized, makes collaboration smoother, and protects everyone’s progress.
Git Refrence Sheet

First steps / phase 1

Don’t worry about automation yet. Let’s focus on:

• Reading in the raw data (download via links in slack)
  • Make sure they are in the data folder and they are in the .gitignore
• Writing a name validator
  • Some students have full names in the “first name” column etc.
• Adding a column with time in minutes format
• Building helper dataframes for mapping:
  • Class codes dataframe
  • Student dataframe
  • Mentor dataframe
  • Staff dataframe
• Adding logging:
  • Keeps track of which sheets we processed
  • Log errors and issues (like the existing tracker)