Check-in System Part 2: Requirements

Before launching into the code for our new check-in system we spent a fair amount of time talking to our youth department and researching other systems on the market. We went into the youth department with the standard many-to-many approach (many kiosks all check in for several rooms). After the first meeting our youth department came back to us and said they did not want that but instead wanted one kiosk in each room. At first I admit I was resistant from the hardware cost alone, but their reasoning made sense. At CCV we have several rooms for each age group. The way most parents select a room is to lean in and 1.) look for the teacher they son/daughter likes best and 2.) look for the room where their child's best friend is in. In a large church where building relationships are key, having a machine dictate a room for a child seemed pretty cold. After talking the business administrator into it (with the logic it wasn't hard) we moved on to the coding process. Other requirements we finalized on were:

• We wanted a single system that was flexible enough to check-in for children (parent check-in), teens (self-check-in), and adults (for classes and events).
• We wanted an UI that we could customize without compiling.
• Security codes for checking in and out kids (3 digit numbers to match kids to receipts)
• Hardware agnostic (i.e. not tied to a particular barcode scanner or printer)
• Be able to check-in using a card with a barcode or using a phone number.
• Be smart enough to ask only the questions needed (i.e. if there is only one service time available to check-in for don't ask for a service time)
• probably a few more that don't come to mind right now...

In the end we added several features that are not on this lists (many minor things like timing for when a check-in can begin and when it must end, the system will automatically engage and disengage the check-in process based on the internal clock). We also added the ability to have many kiosks check-in for a single room. We'll probably add many-to-many check-in in the next few months as we continue to roll it out in the upper grades.