Capita SIMS case study
The client: Capita is the UK's leading business process outsourcing (BPO) and professional services company with over 36,000 employees. Capita Children’s Services is the company behind SIMS, the management information system used by 21,000 primary, secondary and special schools. With over 21 years experience of working in partnership with schools and local authorities it is responsible on a daily basis for the pupil records of nearly 6 million children.
The challenge: The SIMS vision is to ensure all appropriate users can get hold of the pupil achievement information they need to create learning materials for the Learning Platform that will target pupils' weaknesses and develop their strengths. Capita have a history of innovation and identified the BETT 2010 show to showcase a new concept for SIMS. They wanted to build a proof of concept for a next generation system that enabled teacher briefing, student and class views of information. This would allow access to student and teacher memos, class list, student registers and course content but in a compelling way.
The solution: Dot Net Solution is part of the MTC Alliance Program of industry leaders in hardware, software and services. Working in the MTC, Dot Net Solutions and their design partner built a demonstration of how SIMS can be used in classroom to boost the effectiveness of teachers by providing natural data collection capabilities and contextual information about the students in the classroom. This matches their new data mining capabilities and provides a strong vision for the future. A proof of concept application was built that uses existing SIMS data and provides a rich, natural user experience (NUI). This was done by using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows 7 to produce a desktop based application.
Using the multi-touch capabilities of WPF and Windows 7 we created a new SIMS user experience with a natural user interface that relies on familiar physical metaphors such as a class register and allows all students to be swiped in with a single gesture.
This proof of concept was successfully used by Capita to showcase some of its latest ICT innovations for schools at BETT 2010.