Smart Student Monitoring System Using QR Code and an IoT-Enabled ESP32 Board

—Traditional classroom attendance based on roll calls, paper registers and spreadsheets consumes teaching time, is prone to recording errors and offers teachers no centralised view of attendance across sessions. This paper presents the design of a Smart Student Monitoring System that combines session-specific QR codes with an IoT-enabled ESP32 development board. A teacher creates an attendance session through a Flask web application, which generates a unique QR code; students scan the code with their smartphones and submit their details through an attendance webpage; and a SQLite database stores the student ID, name, session ID and timestamp for display on a session-wise teacher dashboard. The ESP32 board provides Wi-Fi connectivity as the IoT component. The paper describes the architecture, hardware connections, supporting mathematical models and the implementation status reached so far. Basic ESP32 operation, Wi-Fi connectivity and the core web-based attendance workflow, including input validation, have been tested with test data, whereas ESP32–server integration, attendance analytics and machine-learning-based identification of students at risk of low attendance are planned. Security, identity verification and privacy requirements are discussed as conditions for real-world deployment. Index Terms—attendance management, ESP32, Flask, Internet of Things, QR code, SQLite, student monitoring