Fencing Competition App - Requirements

Round 1 functionality

1. The Directoire's computer can cope with one competition format : either the format used in PaFF's 1 to 7, or the evolutions of the PaFF-MacMahon system.
2. Initial seeding done manually 
3. Directoire can tweak rankings for second and subsequent rounds, to avoid bouts between classmates.  
4. Directoire's computer can cope with late arrivals

Round 2 functionality

1. The Directoire's computer can give the referee's handheld the full set of bouts for the next round.
2. Referees have the pool information on a handheld device
3. The referee's handheld copes with pools of 5 or pools of 6, or else PaFF-MacMahon rounds of 3 bouts
4. The handheld records the results as they referee, 
5. The handheld returns the whole round's results to the directoire's computer with no additional manual data-entry. 
6. The system keeps records of which referees are parents of which fencers, and assigns makes sure never to assign a referee to a pool his/her child is fencing in.

Round 3 functionality

1. The Directoire's computer can cope with various competition formats, including the format used in PaFF's 1 to 7, and the evolutions of the PaFF-MacMahon system.
2. Referees can choose from a variety of handheld devices
3. Initial seeding done algorithmically, from age, grade, class coach's assessment of rank-in-own-class and previous competition results
4. System can tweak rankings for second and subsequent rounds, to avoid bouts between classmates.
5. Referee's device can cope with a late arrival
6. The directoire's computer can serve the interim results as poolsheet web pages, or transfer the results to a device which can serve the interim results as local poolsheet web pages.
7. The directoire's computer can publish the finalised results to a website

Round 4 functionality

1. The Directoire's computer can display results on a projector, or transfer the results to a device which can display the results on a projector.

Other requirements:
Carry out check-in (Round 1 or Round 2)
Store results in a persistent results database, to provide rankings for future competitions.

The Fencing Competition App - Background

I've been running some fencing competitions in the past few years.

There are a couple of issues that are starting to need to be addressed.

1) We've been running them by hand until now - using small cardboard seeding cards, and totting up the scores from the poolsheets by hand.


The competition has moved from just over a dozen entrants, to over 40 entrants.  So the time taken to process the sheets and determine the winners has moved from 5 minutes to about 25 minutes.  Each round.

Time to automate the process.

The problems remain:  with automation, you simply exchange the time spent totting-up scores for time spent re-typing scores, and (unless you have a printer on-site) you still have to write out the pool sheets.  Plus typing scores from pool-sheet to computer is an error-prone business.  And when the errors so back out on the next round's poolsheet, it becomes a bigger problem...

So what's needed is a system that fills out the poolsheet automatically, and captures the results automatically.

2) For the first 10 fights or so, the pools are mixed ability, so we can stream the fencers together into groups of similar ability for the final round of 5 fights.

So the youngest and the least-skilled spend more than half their time in fights with better or much-better fencers.

What I want is a higher proportion of fights with fencers of your own ability level, as well as results that reflect who fences the best.