I’ve been a skateboarder since 1976 and during decades I’ve been into skateboarding contests all over Brazil as a judge. It was an awful responsibility to give scores (ugh) to all my friendly skateboarders, lots of them world-class skaters…Since then that was clear that it would be possible to improve the whole judging process in several ways.
Well, today lot has changed in a skateboard scenario and… since I became a programmer, why not work in a fully automated judging system from small neighborhoods skateboard contests to a full X-Games type event? So here it is my try: Skate Match!
Skate Match is an app for iPads (will be available for iPhones too) that consists of two modes: the Judge and the Head Table. Judge will give scores to the skaters and send to the guy of the Head Table, who will be the one that is gonna make all the calculations and give the final ranking. So, suppose a contest with 3, 4, 5 judges at the skatepark and one Head Table down at the staff stage receiving wirelessly all the scores from then. That’s how it works!
First of all go to the Settings windows and set up your event. Set the New Task ( like amateur1, amateur2, Feminine, Professional, Kids…) and then the New Round ( like 1,2,3a…). Add the competitor name at the Skater Name text field. Do this for each task/round as you will be entering in the memory. Set if you to keep all judges scores or just the middle ones (!). Set the judge # for each device you use.
The Judge mode has several criteria sliders that you can create like Style, Difficulty or Park Use…you can name it by your own. It calculates the average of all criteria at the SCORE label. After that you can SEND* to the head table your carefully chosen rate for your (un)fortunate friend who was ripping off the park…
The judge window will display what you sent like this below. Great to show how mean you are to the public…
The staff guys or a ladies who is at the Head Table mode will receive all the judge’s scores:
You can add manually the scores pressing “Add Manual” button just in case of no connection situation. Press SAVE to send the rates to the results window.
Keep running the contest, with all “runs” of each “skater” of each “round” and the results table will look like this for ALL LAPS:
And if you press LAPS for BEST LAP results:
Dr. Smith won because of his best run from the three runs he did at the park. As for all the competitor’s requests, we always evaluate the best run on the contest because so they can push as much as they can on their tricks, improving this way the performance and fun for all of us.
- * To connect each device is very straightforward: Enable wi-fi or bluetooth, then just go to Judge’s window, press the red “connect” button and choose HOST to be the Head Table. Then the judge press “connect” and select JOIN to be able to be part of the session and send the scores. If there is no connection, the score will be displayed at full screen window so the head table can see it and add manually.
- Alert! Skate Match stores all the tasks, rounds, runs and skaters automatically, so it will never be cleared unless you do so on the settings window. But, as a precaution, maybe for a tornado, rain, falls, drinkers and so on: always keep track of data by writing in a piece of paper all the results, rounds and skaters, just for the peace of mind!
You can use Skate Match the way you want: full mode, just as judge’s score display or just as results calculator.
*Any questions I will be happy to answer at eduardosallada@hotmail.com*