Maine State Math Meet - Scoring Software
Another State Math Meet come and gone...what a lot of fun!
A few years ago MAML (Maine Association of Math Leagues) approached me with a request to build scorekeeping software for their state math meet. Since math team was something I had done all through high school, and I had been a participant (and high scorer) at the state math meet, I was glad to comply.
The state meet has about one hundred teams, with ten students per team (you can do the math on that!) So there are a lot of students, and the most stressful part of the day for the people running the meet was at the end of the competition when they had to--in a very short amount of time--find the top scoring students and teams, in order to present medals and trophies.
Imagine sorting through a hundred team score sheets, trying to locate the top five freshman, the top eight sophomores, the top twelve juniors, and the top fifteen seniors, and meanwhile you've got a thousand students sitting on the rink of the Cumberland County Civic Center, all snapping their clipboards while they wait for the awards ceremony!
Very stressful.
So I wrote the software for them. It was Windows based, and we had six computers networked together (one computer as the data server, the other five for the five divisions).
It worked beautifully, and everyone loved the fact that once the scores were entered, it only took moments to generate all the high score reports (and they have a slew of reports they need to generate, too!) Of course, it was a bit stressful for me, but hey...what is a math meet without a little bit of stress?
A couple years ago the State of Maine started handing out mac laptops to students
, and all of a sudden it was becoming much more difficult for MAML to provide all the Windows based machines we needed, so this year they asked me to rebuild the software as a web based application. The advantage to that, of course, was that the web based application goes directly to a web browser, so it doesn't matter whether you've got a Linux system, Windows, Macintosh, or whatever. As long as it's got a browser and you can network them, you're good to go.So, yeah. It was a big success. There are a couple little things they want changed for next year (like, before handing out the divisional team awards, they want the overall high scoring team taken out of the list, because they get a separate award. Not a big change).
And it's great fun to be back at the state math meet every year, even though I finished high school almost twenty years ago!
Posted On Apr 21, 2005 at 0:00 AM
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