All church check-in - SUCCESS!

It is a glorious day. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing at about 500 miles per hour. Ah, the desert… But check-in is over for the three big services, and it was a resounding success.

All told we checked in 1,174 kids over three services so far this weekend (1,328 for the entire weekend). The largest service was 527 kids. We used sixteen check-in stations, which is overkill, but made the whole process go very smoothly and quickly. By our testing calculations on Friday we can checkin roughly 100 kids per kiosk per service, not counting the task of entering families. Using the planned twelve stations (the extra four are for other classes and other parts of the campus, but we are using them for the first month or so) we should be able to checkin up to about 1000 kids per service, roughly twice what we have at our biggest service.

This photo was taken at 10:59. Last week at this time there were six lines out the door of people waiting to get to the check-in tables. This week there were a lot of people, but the lines moved quickly and most were able to checkin in under a minute. The longest amount of time was spent explaining to parents what the three labels were for. Next week, those explanations won’t be necessary, making this even faster still.

We found one bug in a beta arena dll (created for us to code around a microsoft problem) that we will get resolved this week. We also found that parents don’t believe that their kids are ever “new walkers” they are only “confident walkers” so we will remove the new walker designation… Still, the weekend was a resounding success.

Thanks again to Jason and Nick at CCCEV for writing the checkin module we are using, and to the guys at Arena for creating a database powerful enough for us to pull this off. Also props to the volunteers around HDC that helped us pull this off. From the kids team to the IT volunteers to the guys that helped us fit out the kiosks, build the back panels for power and ethernet, fill the bottoms with sand etc. it was a true team effort.

Time to celebrate!

Joel (Original post here)

The kiosks are coming!

We finally got all 12 kiosks finished.  Or at-least pretty much finished.  A few of them still need fans installed and the sand (weight) is being added next week, but the big rush is done. We have them, they are functional.  Everybody is really happy with how everything came out.  Our communications department was able to customize the look with vinyl wrap and we were able to still have them functional (meaning portable).

We couldn’t believe how much work these things required. Not just getting them designed and built, but everything required wether we bought them or built them. Mounting the hardware, installing the hardware, cables, zip-ties, cable ties, etc.. One of our secretaries’ husband and son came in to drill all the holes and mount all the hardware for us and then we put everything in and cleaned up the cables.  I think between all of us it probably took about 2.5 - 3 hours per kiosk.