- How would you sum up your IT skills?
Fairly Poor
- In your view what do you feel are wrong with how you keep the data at the moment?
Difficult to keep up with the current scheme, not organised.
Time consuming.
- Do you need any data protection against certain people seeing what is on the database?
I want to allow the students to see the database but not able to change any of my inputs if possible.
- Would you like to be able to feed back to the students?
Yes, showing them graphs and weak points if this is possible.
- What hardware and software do you have available to you to use and hold the spreadsheet on?
512 MB Memory
120MB 8MB SATA Hard Drive
CD/DVD ROM
XP Home Edition
Printer
Excel
Word
Access
- Would you like to be able to use the spread sheet for further years to come?
Yes
- Do you have a computer available to you at all times of marking?
Possibly.
Skills Audit
Mrs Hughes is a Food Technology teacher at Corfe Hills School. She has had to use IT more often over the last 4 to 5 years and now has to deal with IT daily in her job. As Mrs Hughes has no IT qualifications I have no national standard that I can judge her skills on. I asked her to answer some questions about IT so that I can build up an understanding as to what level of IT she can work with.
Key
1= Unconfident 2=Not too bad 3=OK 4=Confident 5=Very confident
Q1 Do you feel confident in opening, closing and saving documents? 3
Q2 Do you feel confident with copying documents with an appropriate name and location? 3
Q3 Are you familiar with macros and how they work in an Excel
spreadsheet? 1
Q4 Are you familiar with creating graphs as an output in an Excel spreadsheet? 2
Q5 Are you familiar with the mail merge function within an Excel
spreadsheet? 1
Q6 Are you happy with the use of V lookups within an Excel
spreadsheet? 1
Q7 On a scale of 1-10 what would you rate your computer knowledge
and skills as (1 a complete beginner and 10 as a high-tech computer engineer)? 2
Q8 Are you happy with using simple formula in Excel and understanding them? 3
Analysis of Results
After using my resources to withdraw information and an understanding of the level of IT that Mrs Hughes can work with I can now sum up what I found out from using my raw data shown on my questionnaire and skills audit.
Mrs Hughes gave me a copy of how she keeps track of what sheets have been handed into her, she also showed me the marking process that she does for each sheet, and both of these examples are on the following pages. From this information and the questionnaire I can see what aspects have to be in my design for inputs and outputs.
The basic ideas that she came up with that I can work on are the following:
Style:
- More organised.
- Quicker to input and store data.
Inputs:
- Student name.
- Predicted grades.
- Marks out of a certain overall mark.
- Sheet name.
Outputs
- Graphs
- Mark Sheet
- Summary Sheet
Processing
- Total all marks obtained by each student.
- Totals box on mark sheet.
- Transfer to summery sheet.
- Individual results and graphs.
Additional requirements:
- Students allowed to see the spreadsheet.
- Easy to use.
After looking at what Mrs Hughes wanted from the questionnaire I have also worked on these ideas and thought of a few possible ideas that I feel would be a benefit to the spreadsheet:
- Colours to show over and underachievement.
- Print outs to store raw data to later be transferred to the database if a computer supporting the shared network is not available.
- Dates that each sheet would roughly be due in for marking.
- An attendance percentage.
The skills audit that I produced to me end user proved to gain to my advantage a great deal. After the results that Mrs Hughes provided me with I can now see to what level I have to base my spreadsheet on. As you can see from the results on the skills audit on the previous page Mrs Hughes is not very confident using many aspects of a computer. This means that I will make my spreadsheet very simple to use, using macros to navigate around the spreadsheet. The formulas will be input and protection on the spreadsheet to reduce errors and data being input into the wrong cells.
System Objectives
After the interview with Mrs Hughes I have been able to gain a good idea of what type of things she wants out of the system. I am going to put all of the ideas that were discussed in the interview into a table to show clearly what my objectives are.
So now that I have highlighted the system processes I will need to develop further and show that Inputs, Outputs and Processes are needed. This will help me see what information I need to input and what I will need to do to the data to produce the wanted output.
Although there aren’t many aspects this is all that Mrs Hughes stated that she wanted from the system. As Mrs Hughes is not very compatible with the use of computers it would be unnecessary to add different things to make the system hard to use and understand.
Validation
Validation is a type of protection, this is added to cells to stop data being entered when people are unauthorised to do so or when data is not needed to be inputted into a certain cell. Validation can be added by the following:
- Custom
- List
- Whole number
- Decimal
- Date
- Time
- Text length
After a validation choice from the above list has been chosen there is then an option of validation that software offers:
- Less than or equal to
- Greater than or equal to
- Equal to
- Not equal to
- Greater than
- Less than
- Between
- Not between
For example if a cell is validated only to accept number inputs and text is inputted error signs can be shown to the user indicating the manual mistake that has occurred. These are very useful to stop user error within a spreadsheet. The following screen dump is an example of an error message shown in excel after cell validation.
Validation will be very beneficial for me to use in my system to minimise manual error within the mark book. I plan to use this feature in my system.
Software choice justification
After looking at all the inputs, outputs and processes that I require to make during my design and final product of a electronic mark book I can now see that there are two main pieces of software I can use for the mark book. These two main pieces are Microsoft Excel and Microsoft access, Mrs Hughes has access to both of these programmes. I have weighed out what would be most beneficial to my mark book and decided to use Microsoft Excel.
The reason that I have chosen to use Microsoft Excel is because there are a lot of things that I need to apply to the mark book that can be done in Excel. These things include validations, graphs, calculations, formula that are available in Excel and sorting. Although Access also does some of these things I find that access gives very extreme validations to data which I feel is not needed for the mark book I am creating for my end user or provide the simple looking final mark book that I require for my end user, also both me and my end user are not very confident with using Access which would create complications and a possible weak end result for Mrs. Hughes.
I did some research into what programme would provide the simplest and easy to use mark book with a simple small scale pretend mark book and a flat file database like Excel provided the cleanest looking, simplest which I feel will be beneficial to my end user because she is not totally confident on a computer, Excel also allowed me to have the use of macros they are much easier to place in Excel than Access, I feel that the use of macros is almost a must have in my mark book to allow simple navigation around the database. After considering all of the things I need I am going to build a flat file in Excel.
Hardware
Mrs. Hughes’ computer is part of a network within the school system, this means that backups of work are regularly made automatically, she is able to access printers at many points within she school if needed but most of the outputs will be see visually on the screen.
