NSW public teacher here. Fairly new to raspberry pi… in fact I’ve only been playing with the pico.
I had an idea for a raspberry pi application and wanted validation to see if it would work and advice how to implement it.
At school, we use an online site called ‘sentral’ to make student data entries. Positive student entries give them ‘asset points’. Students can spend points on rewards.
Currently we export the positive points to a spread sheet, import it to Microsoft access and then it spits out student names and their positive points. We then print this off and stick it around the school notice boards.
Is there a way to integrate raspberry pi to pull this data from sentral and display it on a tv screen somewhere?
The raspberry pi would also need to be coded to subtract points when students spend points.
You could setup a central webserver (on the Pi if needed or anything else on your local network. then have a smart TV show the webpage. All the work and tracking would be done in a central location.
If they TVs cant display a webpage, then you could have a Pi at each TV (and on your network) that could display the webpage.
I think this is going to be the part that makes or breaks this project.
Processing and displaying the data will be the easy part.
I know a little bit about Sentral from Teachers I know but I’m unsure of if there will be an easy way to get this data in a secure way. During my time working in a school data about students had to be handled in a confidential manner. I would suggest checking to see if this project could go against the student data policies the Department of Education has.
If there is an API for Sentral that can be set up to pull the data then that may make this simpler to implement this. That may be the best place to start to see if this project is feasible.
I think… think… your system admin can make something called a “roll solution” which is like a mini-API for just that data. Because Sentral is, quite rightly, worried about automatic and silent data exports, you need to manually authenticate quite often. Maybe that’s OK for you.
