ARCADE has been developed considerably since it began, with some features which may have been envisaged from the start but which were not central to its success, and others for which the insight has been gained through experience.
For example there is a facility to cut down chaos at the start of a semester caused by students tending to change their options and turn up to laboratories they're not registered for. The laboratory manager can specify that certain modules have a `Non-Registered' group for the first one or two sessions. This group contains all of the students in the database who are not registered to take that module, so there is somewhere ready printed to record their lab data if they do turn up.
Related to the above, experience has shown that students are not always quick to recognize the need to tell their department that they are intending to change modules, and this leads to them having a somewhat different view to that of the department as to which modules they are registered for. A feature was added to ARCADE that informs each student, by email, of the details which the system database has about him or her. This can be sent automatically as it changes, so the student can check the accuracy. ARCADE even distinguishes between confirmed and unconfirmed module registrations. When a student appears to be taking a module which they have not officially registered for, the laboratory manager can set their registration to be unconfirmed. The student may then automatically get an email about it that night.
There are times when the laboratory manager wishes to make a note pertaining to a particular session for a particular student. Originally, the only mechanism for storing such notes was by incorporating them in the text of any excuses awarded. A feature was added which allows a query and answer to be associated with a student's record for a session. ARCADE keeps track of queries which have no answer, so this mechanism acts as both a permanent record of notes, and a reminder of things to be followed up. A good use of this, for example, is when one suspects that a piece of work was copied and the student is required to come and talk about it. At the time of suspicion being aroused, one would place the query on the work, and when the matter has been resolved, one would record the answer. Both the query and answer would appear on the student's record when it is printed or emailed to them.
The ability for ARCADE to produce timetables is an extremely useful add-on feature. This was motivated by the annoyance of having to express the laboratory timetables in ARCADE, and also write them separately in a laboratory manual to be given out to the students. Checking that each was consistent with the departmental timetable (in terms of slots in the week) and each other (in terms of actual dates in the year) was a laborious process. ARCADE can now be used to produce the timetables for publication, even writing them for immediate inclusion in a latex document! A spin off from this is the ability to produce timetables for individual students, or individual modules, etc., the latter being useful to help members of staff turn up to the right place at the right time!
Another recent enhancement, which can be taken further, is assistance in allocating laboratory staff to laboratory sessions.
A curiously successful new application of ARCADE has been in using it to email tutorial attendance prompts to tutors on the morning of their tutorials. The tutor merely has to reply to the email after the tutorial, and edit an attendance code next to each tutee's name. This has had the effect of raising the reporting of tutorial attendance to 100%! The modifications to ARCADE to add this feature took only around an hour to implement.
As insight has been gained, and confidence in ARCADE and its strategies has grown, so has a desire to make actions happen without the need for any user interaction (such as the regular emailing of student feedback). ARCADE has the ability for users to run commands automatically under any user-defined conditions at any user-determined time. The maintenance of a user's `remote-jobs' is easy, and a log file is kept so a user can see what has been done if they wish.