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

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