IoT and AI Based Student’s Attendance Monitoring System to Mitigate the Dropout in Non-boarding Secondary Schools of Rwanda: A Case Study of Wisdom School Musanze

Purpose: This project aimed to test an IoT and AI based system that monitor students from home to schools, during class hours and from school to home and notify parents and school administrators about the irregularity observed to their respective children. Methodology: In this project, secondary data was used and was retrieved from the school’s record of Wisdom School Musanze located in Musanze District. The main data to consider were sex whether male or female. Another important data was orphanage,whether pupil is orphan or not orphan, and school fees payment by checking whether student paid school fees or had not paid.  These mentioned data were taken randomly from senior one (S1) to senior six (S6) in academic year 2020-2021. Findings: The system is equipped of a finger print sensor to register and verify students and staff attendance, a Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor to detect the presence of human to wake-up the device, a real time clock to synchronize each generated report with the local time. A web application is developed to allow students real-time monitoring for parents and school administrators and the system is be able to generate a daily, monthly and annually report.   Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: Classification machine learning with decision-tree algorithm is used to analyze data and generate a model to evaluate the impact of monitoring attendance on preventing students to dropout. The generated model with accuracy of 91.4% shows that keeping students’ attendance at high percentage would reduce significantly the dropout rate in secondary schools of Rwanda.