Did you lose your meal card at school? This high school in Dongguan uses a “meal card” that will not be lost

How many cards do you have?

As a big card holder, I used to have countless cards. Student card, bus card, subway card, bank card, medical card, and various store membership cards, it’s easy to fill three wallets. Of course, as more and more membership cards are transferred online and subway cards become bus codes, my wallet can finally change from bulging to minimalist style.

Among these cards, the student card has a strong sense of "youth limitation". After all, you can no longer use it if you leave the campus. So in recent years, we have digitized more cards and carried them with small programs and apps, but we don’t know that many schools have combined their campus card with students’ faces to complete digitization.

In Dongguan Fifth Senior Middle School (hereinafter referred to as Dongguan Fifth Middle School), we have felt this change in campus payment methods.

"Eating by face" became a reality in this school

What is the campus card consumption in your memory?

Losing cards, loading and queuing is the pain in my memory. A good meal card was lost when I said it was lost. I lost a total of 3 campus cards in the entire high school. For a careless person like me, I paid 15 yuan for a card many times. Both queuing and stockpiling were necessary. At that time, the classmates ridiculed each other for "not actively eating and thinking problems." As soon as the bell rang for the last get out of class, they started running towards the cafeteria. But when you get to the cafeteria, you still need to queue up, line up + eat, and the lunch break is seriously squeezed.

But in Dongguan Fifth Middle School, there are basically no students who lost their cards. Because last year, the school added a WeChat face-swiping payment channel in the cafeteria, allowing students to swipe their cards with their faces to "eat on their faces".

The popularity of new payment methods is coming sooner than expected. The cafeteria staff are used to the new payment method within a day or two; the students use the system to take pictures and enter the facial data uniformly under the arrangement of the school, matching the facial data with the school’s class name; the parents are Using the "Kangaroo Campus" applet on your mobile phone, you can see your child's consumption at school.

Previously, this school with 2,200 students had an average of 50 people reissue the card every week, but after the introduction of the WeChat face-swiping device, the students who swiped the face-cards were free from the trouble of loading.

After the students "swiped their face cards", the problem that the all-in-one card needed to be stored regularly was also solved. The phenomenon of students needing to recharge the all-in-one card regularly in the transfer machine or manual window is almost gone. With the cooperation of the WeChat wallet and the relative card, the balance of the student’s parent’s WeChat wallet is the student’s meal card balance. If the money is not enough, just deposit money directly in the WeChat wallet.

The phenomenon of queuing has also been alleviated by this way of paying by face-washing. The original queuing for meals was serious, because students needed to indicate the dishes they wanted by hand. The aunt in the cafeteria would calculate the prices of the dishes and serve meals for the students after confirmation. The entire process took a long time and the error rate was high.

But in the face-swiping device of the school's WeChat Pay, the student ordering process in the cafeteria has changed. They swipe their face recognition ID on one end of the screen in front of the canteen, and then choose the dishes they want on the screen. At the other end of the canteen screen, the auntie in the canteen only needs to watch the students' choices on the screen. The auntie in the canteen who does not need to calculate the price and confirm the dishes can serve the students as soon as possible.

The efficiency is improved and the queues are naturally reduced.

The manager of the cafeteria, Lu Weiqing, praised this feature. He said that although the original card swiping was very simple, "Auntie, she has to count the dishes ordered by the students. Besides, the aunt is already in her forties and 50s. The time is not always accurate. Once something is wrong, some students will complain, and then the school will find the reason."

With the use of WeChat face-swiping payment, the cafeteria is more efficient, makes fewer mistakes, and has better reviews.

For parents, the function of relative card plus WeChat face-swiping payment makes them more at ease. Because in the small program "Kangaroo Campus", they can know whether the child has eaten well during the days when they live in school, and they can also know what the child ate after brushing his face. Even when the WeChat wallet balance is insufficient and the deduction fails, this small program can promptly send reminders, and parents can also check monthly bills on "Kangaroo Campus".

However, after the trial of the new payment method, some parents expressed concern because their children's consumption has increased. The child’s face payment is bound to the parents’ WeChat wallet. Students who face payment can spend as much as they want, and no longer need to calculate the cost of the meal card as before. This led to an unexpected growth curve in revenue in the school cafeteria in the first two months of the trial of face payment.

Of course, after some parents report the situation, the school and the technology provider together provide parents with a consumption limit function. Parents can set an upper limit for the child's single consumption and single day consumption, so that the child can continue to plan for consumption.

The Dongguan Fifth Middle School canteen is very smart, with no lost cards, no transfers, and fewer queues, allowing students to "eat on their faces".

In addition to not being able to borrow books, the face is the universal ID of this school

In addition to being able to "eat on the face" in the cafeteria, students can do more with faces in Dongguan No. 5 Middle School.

It can open the doors of some meeting rooms, making it easier to use the meeting rooms that previously required registration and key retrieval.

It can measure the temperature with one button, swipe the face and enter the door when entering the dormitory and other areas, which not only completes the student's clock-in, but also completes the temperature measurement.

It can enter and exit the campus, and enter the school information that was originally required to be collected by the "academic dean-class teacher-class leader" into the computer, and the system can directly display the student's attendance.

It can also buy things in the commissary and infirmary, and complete the payment with one swipe of the face.

But in a certain limited scene, the face brush still didn't get through, and the students still needed a card. Cheng Qinglei, deputy director of the Office of Dongguan No. 5 Middle School, introduced to us that students in the school library are not yet able to borrow books with their faces, and they still need to rely on the original all-in-one card.

The library is not talking about borrowing and returning books with your face. The library management system also includes the management of your entire library collection. At present, the library also has a solution for borrowing and returning books with facial recognition. We are also exploring this area and do some docking with companies in this area. But from our current point of view, a card is needed to borrow and return books in the school and library scene.

Facing the last unconquered scene, Dongguan Fifth Middle School is also trying more possibilities. Finding a suitable solution so that the school’s smart library can also borrow and borrow is already on the school’s agenda.

Let go of your worry and pay with your face to enter the campus

But faced with a new way of brushing faces, Dongguan Fifth Middle School was also worried at first.

• Doesn’t it stop when you’re disconnected when you brush your face? What to do if the network is not good?
• The credit card system has been used for several years, and the safety of funds is guaranteed. Can face payment guarantee the safety of school funds?
• The balance of the meal card is displayed, but there is no payment by swiping the face. If the parents have no money in the WeChat wallet, will the child be unable to eat?

However, in actual applications, the concerns of Dongguan No. 5 Middle School were "answered" by actual usage.

The Internet is indeed very important for WeChat face payment, just as the credit card system will be limited when it encounters a power failure. But the biggest difference in face payment is "Although the Internet is important, it is not impossible to have no Internet occasionally." In the system settings, when the network fails and the system is running offline, students can still order and eat normally, but at this time, the meals they buy have not been deducted due to the offline operation of the system. When the network is restored and the system is back online, the system will collect all the funds that have not been received before.

In other words, even if the Internet is disconnected, students can eat first. The network is restored, and the parents of the students pay again. This may be the "digital credit" of the digital age.

However, Dongguan Fifth Middle School also hopes that this kind of "digital credit" will be less, so they deliberately pulled a network cable for the canteen to ensure that the canteen network can support the daily use of the canteen.

The issue of school funding security is endorsed by large companies.

The school understands that in the entire face-swiping payment process, the company that provides the face-swiping device for Dongguan No. 5 Middle School does not directly contact the money paid by the school’s teachers and students. They only provide tools and services. Funds are automatically transferred to the school's public account by WeChat Pay after "T+1" days. Just like ordinary WeChat payment transactions, no middle merchant will touch the money.

With the new payment tool, the money is still safe, which is an important reason for schools to introduce facial payment with confidence.

When students use facial recognition to pay and bind their parents’ WeChat wallets, a derivative problem is that the parents’ wallets are out of money, but the children don’t know it. This may cause the students to have no money to deduct during meals. In order to solve this problem, the solution provided by the service provider to the school is to allow students to owe fees once when they brush their faces.

This solution ensures that students can consume normally when the parent WeChat wallet balance is insufficient. At the same time, the system will notify parents of insufficient WeChat wallet balance to remind parents to pay attention to the balance. After the parents’ wallet balance is sufficient and the arrears are paid, the students can use the system normally.

Smart campus, not just pay with face

Dongguan Fifth Middle School is the pioneer of smart campus. The smart library cabinets that can be seen everywhere in the campus, the facial payment devices that can be used everywhere, and the heat preservation and disinfection lunch boxes that can be received by brushing the face are part of the smart campus.

But this does not mean that the school’s attempts have been successful. The heat preservation and disinfection lunchbox cabinet still has not been able to get through the existing facial brushing system, and the idle tool cabinet also proves the failure of some attempts.

The reason why face payment has been successful in schools is that it really improves the user experience.

For this school with more than 2200+ students but about 200 students lose their meal cards every month, the loss rate of nearly 10% meal card is far beyond most people's imagination. Through the introduction of face payment, the number of students who lost their meal card has been greatly reduced, and the number of students who go out without a meal card has increased.

Face-swiping payment is convenient for these users. Although the traditional transfer machines and all-in-one card recharge windows are still there, an unstoppable trend is that more and more students use face-swiping payment in schools.

And schools have begun to further use this part of the data, the most direct is the consumption data of the cafeteria, which dishes are popular and which dishes are not popular. Through the quantified data, the canteen managers are also making decisions that are more suitable for the target population. The school also looks forward to starting with what students eat in the future, obtaining more accurate nutritional data of students' intake, and establishing connections with students' height, weight and other indicators.

Facial payment is an attempt by the school outside the classroom, and in the smart classroom, they have more ideas to realize. Dongguan Fifth Middle School, which started experimenting with educational informatization in 2015, has also summarized its own methodology in attempts after repeated attempts.

The construction of a smart campus cannot find a system for a certain function, so there will be many systems. We need top-level planning and design so that users can experience convenient services on campus.

We believe that the core of a smart campus is the interconnection of data. In the end, we can continuously aggregate the data of various business systems and various application scenarios in the school. With more and more data, it in turn provides services for teaching and education.

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Ai Faner | Original link · View comments · Sina Weibo