Priya's Studio Streaks

A shared attendance link for a dance school that ranks students by how many weeks in a row they have turned up.

Who this is for

Priya Deshpande runs a dance school in two rooms above a sweet shop in Kothrud, Pune. About ninety students across six batches, taught by Priya and two teachers, Meenal and Arjun. The moment is a Saturday evening after the last batch, with the annual show three weeks away, when Priya has to decide who stands in the front row and who gets the solo bits.

How the job is done today

Each batch has its own paper register. Meenal ticks names in a long notebook, Arjun sometimes forgets and marks from memory the next day. Photos of register pages go into the teachers' WhatsApp group so Priya can see them. When the show comes around, Priya sits on the studio floor with three notebooks and a scroll of blurry photos, trying to remember who actually came through the monsoon and who only turned up once the costumes were announced.

The screens, in order

1. Batches — Lets whoever opened the link pick the batch they are teaching right now.
2. Mark class — Lets a teacher tap the students who came, in the minute before the music starts.
3. Standings — Shows every student ranked by how many weeks in a row they have come, so the dedicated ones are obvious at a glance.
4. Student — Shows one student's weeks as a simple row of came and missed, so Priya can see if a gap was one bad fortnight or a slow drift away.
5. Add student — Lets a teacher put a new joiner into a batch with just a name, so marking never waits on paperwork.

What it keeps track of

• Students — name, which batch, the day they joined, still coming or has left
• Batches — batch name, which days and what time, which teacher usually takes it
• Attendance — which student, which batch, which date, which teacher marked it

The one decision that matters

Whether the standings count classes attended or weeks attended. Counting classes looks fair but is not: a girl in the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Bollywood batch would always sit above a boy in the Sunday-only Bharatanatyam batch who has not missed a single Sunday in a year. Counting weeks means a student earns a week by coming at least once in it, and the streak breaks only when a whole week goes by without them. Go with weeks. It measures what Priya actually means by dedicated, which is showing up reliably, and it lets students from every batch sit on the same list.

What to leave out of the first version

No logins, no separate teacher and student views, and no fee tracking. The link lives in the teachers' WhatsApp group and that is the whole door. Fees already have their own notebook and UPI history, and mixing them in would turn a thirty-second marking job into an accounts job. Leave out messages to parents and certificates for long streaks too, until the teachers have marked every class for a couple of months and the numbers can be trusted.

How you would know it worked

When Priya picks the front row for the annual show, it is done from the standings on the phone in a few minutes, and nobody in the teachers' WhatsApp group has posted a photo of a register page for weeks.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run a dance school in Pune with about ninety students in six batches, and two other teachers help me. I want a simple phone app where we mark who came to each class and then see all students ranked by how many weeks in a row they have come. There should be no login at all, just one link I put in our teachers' WhatsApp group, and anyone with the link can mark attendance. A teacher opens it, picks the batch, taps the names of students who are present, and it remembers which teacher marked it. The ranking should count weeks, not classes, so a Sunday-only student who never misses is not beaten by someone in a three-days-a-week batch. A student keeps their streak if they come at least once that week. I also want to tap a student and see their weeks as came or missed, and add a new student to a batch with just their name. Keep it quick enough to use in the minute before class starts.