When I was in 11th and 12th grade, I built a fees management system for my school using FoxPro. At that time, I was learning programming and databases, and I wanted to build something that could actually solve a real problem.
The application had a GUI, a relational database, and different user roles for staff. It connected different departments and labs in the school. If a student had any pending charges from a lab or another department, those charges would automatically appear in the fee management system. This made it easier to keep all the fee records in one place and reduced manual work.
I was really excited about the project, so I used to take special permission from the school to stay back during lunch breaks and work on it. Those lunch hours became my coding time. I spent them writing code, fixing bugs, testing new features, and learning through trial and error.
Building this project helped me go beyond just learning FoxPro. I got practical experience in designing a database, making simple user interfaces, handling different user roles, and building something that actually worked for day-to-day school use. I also learned a lot by debugging issues and testing things properly before adding new features.
At that time, it just felt like an interesting project to work on during lunch breaks, but it also gave me a clearer idea of how software is built and maintained in real situations.
Unfortunately, the project was stored on a floppy disk and that got corrupted, so I do not have any screens from that project.
The room on the left bottom of this image was the fee collection room.
