National Magazine Highlights Student-designed Attendance App

Matthew DuBois ’26 and Luke Graham ’26 created CheckPoint Student for LJCDS students and beyond.
This article appeared as “For Students, By Students” in the Summer 2025 issue of Independent School Magazine from the National Association of Independent Schools.

School News: Designing a Digital Attendance Tracking App

In 2023, two students at La Jolla Country Day School (CA) noticed that tracking student attendance was becoming inconvenient and insecure. For example, during free periods when students were required to sign in on a clipboard that was located across campus, some of them were asking their friends to sign them in to save time. 

Matthew DuBois and Luke Graham, now rising seniors who have been part of the school’s design and innovation program for the past two years, were determined to find a more secure solution. Throughout their sophomore year in the program—which is now in its 10th year and is part of a larger K–12 initiative emphasizing 21st-century skills, such as entrepreneurship and product development—they worked to create a digital attendance tracking product now called CheckPoint Student that the school is currently using. 

DuBois and Graham started by meeting with the school administrator responsible for tracking attendance in the upper school to learn more about the process and determine the most effective way to track when and where people checked in. To develop a user-friendly product, they considered what technology would best meet staff needs and what would make it easier for students to check in. Knowing that nearly all of the upper school students have smartphones, they set out to create an app-driven product that would leverage this reality and be intuitive to set up and use.

Inspired by the concept of Apple Pay, which uses near-field communication (NFC) technology to allow users to tap their phones to pay, and with guidance from their design and innovation teacher, Dan Lenzen, DuBois and Graham researched NFC technology and taught themselves how to develop apps and integrate electronic components using online resources and collaborating outside of school hours. The resulting system they designed relies on NFC tags placed around campus that students tap to sign in to their classes once they have downloaded the CheckPoint Student app.

In fall 2024, the school started using CheckPoint Student to track attendance in the upper school. In addition to a successful rollout that has improved tracking, DuBois and Graham got a lot of positive feedback about its usefulness and decided to pitch their product to the school’s venture capital fund, Torrey Explorers Fund. In December 2024, they were awarded $5,000 that they are using to further develop their product and reach out to potential customers at other schools. In February, they had a booth at the NAIS Thrive 2025 conference to promote their product and connect with independent school leaders.

Plans for the next phase of product development are focused on expanding the system’s capabilities to help account for students during emergency scenarios, such as school lockdowns, fires, or earthquakes.

Learn more about CheckPoint Student at ckpnt.com.
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