ZAP

Project Description

At the end of each school year, the 10th-year pupils in Bremen take their final exam. The State Institute for Schools in Bremen is responsible for administering these exams, providing schools with the necessary material for both regular and make-up exams, and collecting and analyzing the results. The individual schools are responsible for ordering the materials, conducting the exam, and entering the results.

We developed a web application that manages this process. The web application enables schools to order materials for both exams, manage students, and enter results. It automatically calculates grades and compiles detailed, actionable reports for the State Institute for Schools, significantly reducing manual effort and improving data accuracy.

The web application features hierarchical user management with three roles (LIS Admin, School Admin, and Teachers) and is integrated with the existing Single Sign On(SSO) from Bremen and Bremerhaven. This simplifies access, makes user management more efficient, and provides additional safety.

Users can view a dashboard that is customized according to both their role and group at any time to track the current phase of the final examination process, for example, whether the result entry has started or the feedback is already available, ensuring that no step is missed.

Although the initial project has been completed, our relationship with the State Institute for Schools in Bremen is ongoing. We continue to support the web application to ensure smooth operation and have implemented new features as needed, such as extended reporting options, additional formatting tools, and improved help text formatting.

What we liked

There are a couple of things we loved about the project, but one of the best has to be the dashboards. The dashboards on ZAP are specific to the user and are customized by the user’s role and group. This means that users only see details that are relevant to them, nothing more, nothing less.

• Teachers see the state of their study groups, for example, how many pupils participated, or how many results are finalized
• Principals see both states aggregated for their school
• The LIS admin sees the big picture across all schools

This focus makes it such that no single person is overwhelmed with unnecessary information and helps them to self-manage.

But they go further. The dashboards do not just show the status of activities, they are organised in a super intuitive way, making them active guides for the whole process. They show the status of each step in a visually clear way and allow users to instantly see what phase they are on, what’s coming next, and what’s required from them.

The dashboards reduce confusion and prevent mistakes, they keep everyone in sync from teachers right up to the LIS Admin. They speed up the workflow since everyone knows what's next. The dashboards keep the entire process moving smoothly and ensure no steps are missed, and everyone feels in control. They are awesome.