[NSRCA-dist8] Contest Scoring Ideas

[Gordon Anderson]

Ray,

I think the hand held device you talked about is the iScore concept. 
This could be developed using an iPhone. Regarding the business 
opportunity; I don't think there is any money to be made in the pattern 
community. We have less than 100 contests a year run by, I would guess, 
less than 40 different groups / CDs. The numbers are too low to develop 
systems with the intent of making money or even recovering your 
development efforts.

--Gordon

Raymond C. Gauthier wrote:
> Gordon,
>
> The idea has merit, but it also has increased possibilities for error.  I
> personally (at best a mediocre judge) would prefer to continue to write on a
> score sheet even if I occasionally have to glance at it to be sure I'm
> writing in the correct place.
>
> In a perfect world there would be some one-handed device which could
> "clicked" the proper number of times to score each maneuver and would then
> print out a mini-scorecard at the end to assure the proper number of
> maneuvers were scored and for scoring turn-in.  Problem is ... I have idea
> what that device might be.  Could be a good business opportunity for some
> specialty RC electronics company - it would be easy to design and probably
> pretty cheap to build.  What do you think?
>
> Ray Gauthier 
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gordon Anderson [mailto:GAA at owt.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2009 4:08 PM
> To: AK, ID, MT, OR, WA, WY
> Subject: [NSRCA-dist8] Contest Scoring Ideas
>
> All,
>
> OK, its pretty quite on this list and I have a couple of ideas about 
> running the 2009 contest scoring that I would like to discuss. The deal 
> is we mostly do not use scribes due to lack of people etc. This means a 
> lot of judges look away from the plane to write the scores on the score 
> sheet. The preferred method that some, but not all, judges use is to 
> write the scores on a piece of scratch paper and then at the end of the 
> flight they transcribe the data to the score sheet. The negative part of 
> this process is the delay during transcription and the paper you waste 
> in the process. There is always a chance of error during this 
> transcription because the judge is always in a hurry. The nice thing is 
> your eyes never leave the plane and you miss nothing.
>
> So to make this work a little better how about we just get ride of the 
> score sheets all together. We can cut 8 1/2" by 11" plain blank paper 
> into three 11" long strips and the judge just puts the scores on the 
> strip of paper along with the pilots name and the judges name or number. 
> The score keeper can just enter the numbers into the scoring program and 
> staple the strip of paper to the score sheet that is printed out after 
> the scores are entered. This would remove the requirement to print score 
> sheets and make the process run a little faster. The only thing the 
> judge would need to do is count up his scores at the end of a flight to 
> make sure he has the right number of scores, this would serve as a quick 
> cross check. This process would completely remove the need to look down 
> because there is nothing but a blank strip of paper to look at. Some 
> judges like to see the list of maneuvers that are to be flown before the 
> flight so we could deal with this by just posting an enlarged call card 
> just behind the pilots that the judges can see, this would allow them to 
> review the list between flights.
>
> Please share your thoughts on this idea...
>
> Also, I think it would be real cool to develop an iPhone scoring 
> application, lets call it iScore. We could run the entire contest from a 
> couple of iPhones and upload all the results to a web site and make it 
> all publicly available. This would enable anyone to log on and see the 
> status at any time, we could make a paperless process except for the 
> strips of paper the judges write the raw scores on....
>
> --Gordon
>
>
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