Design Team Member: Rishi Dean
Supervisor: Dr. David Clausi
Background
The inherent nature of the game of basketball is fast-paced, with multiple incidents occurring on the court simultaneously. Human statisticians record the events using conventional pen & paper technology; subsequently, the statistics are entered into a computer database for storage, and for further data manipulation. Once the information lies in the database, the statistics are manipulated in countless ways for reasons ranging from simple archiving, to analysis and strategy development, to publishing to the Internet for the purposes of game-casting. The logging of game events and development of statistics is a crucial and essential component to all levels of play in basketball.
With the prevalence and relative affordability of hand-held computing devices, there now exists a medium that is capable of meeting the demands of logging basketball statistics in real-time. Furthermore, this platform provides the capability to encompass all facets of this task in one device. It is the purpose of this project to explore the handheld platform as a means to provide a usable medium for recording incidents in a basketball game and performing statistical analysis in real-time.
Project description
The task of recording basketball statistics is demanding on the human operator due to the inherent nature of the game. Consequently multiple operators must often work together using a traditional pen & paper solution. The second aspect of this task is to enter the data into existing software statistics systems. Pen and paper give the user the opportunity to visualize the progress of the game and to track spatial court locations of incidents. Software solutions allow for easy storage and retrieval of game statistics. At this time existing solutions do not effectively combine these modalities in order to expedite the process. This workshop will investigate the design and implementation of a proof-of-concept system for the logging of basketball statistics using the Palm platform and the Java K virtual machine. The core objective of this workshop is to realize a proof-of-concept system to demonstrate that basketball statistics can be recorded in a real-time manner using the Palm platform.
Design methodology
This application is primarily graphical in nature allowing for users to record the time and spatial location on the court of shots taken, assign the player responsible, and indicate the result of the shot.
This project will consist of the following components:
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Research of development tools and environment on the Palm, and selection of the optimal configuration
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Create a functional specification and architecture specification of the system accounting for human-computer interaction issues and technical considerations while developing for the Palm OS
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Implement the design and conduct usability testing of the device in live game situations to benchmark its performance with the target population.
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Develop recommendations for future extension and research