Japanese cram school uses RFID and SMS to track kids
Continuing the fine Japanese (and — let's be fair here — American) tradition of using RFID tags to let parents keep track of their kids, Tomas, a "cram school" (an after-school tutoring center), is now having students check in and out with RFID-enabled cards. And just to make sure parents know exactly what's going on, the school uses SMS to automatically inform parents when their kids have arrived and departed. Cram school classes can run pretty late (witness the bleary-eyed kid in the Tomas illustration to the right), so parents may feel they have the right to know when their kids are coming home, but what ever happened to just asking them to call when they're leaving? Don't these kids have cell phones?
