EduTap: An RFID-Enabled Cashless Canteen Transaction and Digital Allowance System for Basic Education Students of St. Clare College

Abstract

The traditional cash-based transaction ecosystem within educational institutions faces persistent challenges, including protracted queuing times, structural vulnerabilities to cash loss, and an absolute deficit in parental financial oversight. This study designs, implements, and evaluates EduTap, a web-based, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled cashless canteen transaction and digital allowance management platform tailored explicitly for the basic education sector of St. Clare College. Adopting a quantitative approach embedded within a developmental-descriptive-evaluative research design, the system was engineered using an Iterative/Incremental Software Development Methodology. The technical architecture integrates an interactive frontend developed using TypeScript, ReactJS, and Tailwind CSS, coupled with a cloud-based backend utilizing Firebase Authentication and Cloudinary alongside Firestore and Realtime Databases.
The system was evaluated by 120 purposively sampled stakeholders, equally distributed (n = 30) across four distinct user strata: students, parents/guardians, class advisers, and canteen personnel. Empirical validation via an Independent Samples t-test revealed a statistically significant reduction in transaction latency ( t (198) = 62.45, p < 0.0001), with mean purchase execution times plummeting from 42.0 seconds via traditional cash handling to 12.0 seconds utilizing the EduTap RFID protocol. System evaluation metrics aligned with the ISO/IEC 25010 Software Quality Model demonstrated exceptional acceptability, yielding an overall weighted mean of 4.66(SD = 0.34), signifying unanimous verbal interpretation of "Strongly Agree." Furthermore, a formal Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) confirmed economic viability, establishing a rapid payback period of 1.07 years and a projected 3-year Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) of 2.17. These findings conclusively indicate that the deployment of EduTap eliminates operational cash dependencies, establishes strict parental expenditure caps, minimizes cash loss, and drastically enhances overall campus transaction efficiency.