Kiosk check-in, from setup to first tap

4 min read

Every studio that's ever run a class off a paper attendance sheet knows exactly how this goes: the sheet gets left in the office, someone forgets to bring a pen, a name gets spelled wrong and now there are two entries for the same kid, and by the end of term nobody can say with real confidence who actually showed up to what. Kiosk check-in exists to make all of that simply not a problem anymore.

It's mandatory across every tier your studio runs, memberships, casual drop-ins, teams, all of it funnels through the exact same tablet by the door. There's deliberately no opt-out and no "present by default" setting anywhere, a student is only ever marked present because they genuinely, physically tapped in themselves.

Setting it up, the first time

1
Open yourstudio.dancebase.com.au/kiosk in a browser on whichever tablet you're dedicating to this.
2
Put that browser into full-screen kiosk mode, most tablets have a built-in "guided access" or kiosk-lock feature made for exactly this kind of single-purpose use.
3
Prop it up somewhere genuinely visible at your front desk or right by the door, plugged in, and leave it running.

Exactly what a student sees when they walk up. First and last name, tap Check In, done, no app to install.

Name, not a login

Check-in matches on first and last name, not the username and password a student uses to log in and book elsewhere in the app. Type the name exactly as it's on the student's record, a genuine typo won't match.

What actually happens when a student taps in

They type their first and last name and tap Check In. Behind that one tap, Dancebase looks for their booking against whichever class is running right now, at this exact moment, and marks them present. This works reliably and unambiguously specifically because of the one-class-per-slot rule covered in Scheduling classes, there's never more than one possible booking to match a name against at any given time.

Every state a student might actually see

Success. A clear, immediate confirmation the moment check-in registers correctly.
Already checked in. Tapping in twice never double-marks anything or throws a confusing error, it politely confirms they're already checked in and shows the original time they arrived.
No booking found. The kiosk says so plainly rather than silently failing or guessing, genuinely worth checking they're actually booked into today's specific session before assuming something's broken.
Nothing running right now. If no class is currently in its check-in window at all, the kiosk tells them that too, rather than incorrectly matching them to the wrong class just to show *something*.

What the kiosk shows outside any check-in window, the real, current default: opens 20 minutes before class start.

The check-in window itself

20 minutes before a class starts through 15 minutes after by default, configurable from Settings if your studio genuinely needs it wider or tighter, the kiosk's own on-screen copy is generated straight from that same setting, so they can never drift apart. Outside that window, a student simply can't check into that particular session, on purpose, it keeps attendance data meaningfully tied to when a class actually happened.

Team practice sessions use this exact same screen, with zero separate "team mode." A team member taps in precisely the same way a regular student does, and that single tap is what actually drives every bit of Team's attendance and strike tracking underneath.