Safely to School & Back

Abstract

Safety of the children plays a key role in parents’ lives. Even though they can be responsible for it when they are with their children, they cannot expect others to be the same way as equally as they are. Private school transportation services are one of the most used school transportation methods in Sri Lanka. The parents with children who receive transportation from these private school services go through many difficulties due to the lack of information available to them regarding their children during the transportation process. Considering the Sri Lankan private school transportation services, there are many issues parents, drivers and school children encounter in the process. Lack of information available to parents regarding the children, limitations in providing information regarding children to their parents, communication constraints and so on; which caused parents’ and drivers’ dissatisfaction on the current process. Based on this background, this project aims to research on the issues parents and drivers are displeased in the process; and to design, implement and evaluate an IT Solution which would contribute in solving these issues. The project is initially focussed at the Sri Lankan private school transportation services sector. In order to implement and deliver an effective IT solution for the parents and drivers to cater these issues; private school transportation process, parents’ involvement, drivers’ involvement, communication constraints, and emergencies that can arise during the process were evaluated upon existing literature followed up by gathering validations through questionnaires and interviews with parents and drivers. The results of questionnaires and interviews validated the identified problems and causes of them. Building on the same, the IT solutions “Safely to School & Back” was created. The prototype implemented was evaluated by expert and non-expert users followed up with a self-evaluation and was highly rated by the end users.