DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF HOSTEL INFORMATION SYSTEM

ABSTRACT

The growing number of students in higher institutions poses a lot of accommodation problems for students   and School Management. Some of these problems include, few hostel not properly managed, Statistics of rooms required to match the growing number of student are far fetched. Also hostel administrators cannot give accurate information of the occupancy of a particular room. In View of all these, the solution proffered by this project is to have an automated hostel allocation system that not only gives student the opportunity to select their hostel of choice, but also provides the hostel administrators necessary functionalities to adequately manage the accommodation process in the school. To be able to achieve this, proper research was done on the already existing solution in the school, which is manual, and also on automated solutions deployed in other institutions like the University of Nigeria Nsukka. It was realized that for such a system to work effectively there will be need for certain functionalities to be implemented. First, there should be avenue to add new hostel, block, room or bunk space. Second, the system should be able to be fed with the records of students that have duly paid their school fees. Third, students who have been uploaded should be able to get hostel on visiting the system. And lastly, the hostel administrators should be able to download records showing the status of the hostels indicating those that have been occupied and those that have not. Putting all these in consideration the system was designed using the V-Model OOAD methodology and implemented as a web based solution, for ease of access, with web forms using Microsoft ASP.NET C# and SQL Server as the database backend.

CHAPTER ONE

               INTRODUCTION

1. BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Computer as indispensible tools in the total life of human endeavor has gained precedence in the world especially in the development growth of the Nigeria society.  Computers are super machines that convert physical/mental effort into a mere easy life. The use of computer in our everyday life cannot be over emphasized. This is because of the gradual increase in human population and complexity of life, which has equally brought about increase in volumes of data being generated every day.

The gradual increase in human population has equally affected the education sector. Thus higher institutions in the country today are currently faced with the challenges of hostels/halls allocation to students. The fact remain that the number of students usually out numbers the available accommodation.

It is safe to say that most activities such as hostel allocation that are carried out in most universities in Nigeria are done manually. Therefore, there is a lot of strain on the individuals running the hostel allocation. An E-hostel system is simply software developed for managing most activities that take place in the hostels with the help of a hostel administrator [1].

The goal of this research work is to provide a solution to the problem of hostel management, by designing a computerized system which is user-friendly and GUI-oriented that will be compatible with the existing manual system. The system will solve the problem of hostel management; thus helping to reduce problems associated with the manual hostel management system. The system can only be accessed by students who have paid school fees for the current semester.   The project uses Godfrey Okoye University thinker’s corner Enugu as case study.

1.   STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Students at the beginning of each session waste half of the semester looking for accommodation.

1. The few hostels that exist in the universities are not properly managed, since they are using manual system, which is paper-based. The possibility of losing the data is very high, Lots of paper are required to store all the information, data could be misplaced due to human error or in the event of a break in, data could be stolen very easily;
2. It usually takes time to retrieve data or information that has been stored, because the workers need to find the actual folder where the data was stored previously.
3. Most often students pay for hostel fee and end up not getting one due to lack of bed spaces when there are enough space.
4. Hostel administrators cannot give accurate information of the occupancy of a particular room.

These and many more form the statement of the problem that necessitated this research work.