When graduating earlier this week, I had to defend my thesis, which aimed to discuss the tools I used while developing a registration system for students of my high school, which can be used to sign up to various types of events that are made available to the students throughout the year.

Why not just use Google Forms for signups?

It’s true that solutions like Google Forms provide a very simple and elegant solution to many requirements educational institutions have, for instance, easy user management (since they most likely already are on Google Workspace) or ease-of-use for the teachers taking care of organizing the events. The problems arise when you want to have anything dynamic in your form, which our school encountered in multiple ways. Firstly, none of the aforementioned solutions allow you to have proper “capacity” fields on options, which would let certain options (like an arts project at a “Project week”) be exhausted after a certain amount of users join them. There are ways to work around this, like Choice Eliminator for Google Forms, but setting it up is not straight-forward. Another issue we encountered is selection logic: it is very nice if you can limit some events to only some classes and/or have custom logic for allowing or disallowing certain combinations of options.

This took me a year to build, but we had our first successful test of the app in April and are planning to have all events managed and organized through it going forward.

If you like reading and are fine with Czech, feel free to read the thesis through, but if you prefer the code, visit the repo.