Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Grader: What?/How?

What?
Below is a screen-shot of the main window for the Grader application:


The Grading Key displays the grade data for the current grading category, which is determined by the current selected cell in the lower grade-entry table. The Grading Key provides a reference to the grading criteria as the user traverses through the grading table.

Although it does not require an entry, the play field allows the user to enter a name for the current play.

Other than that, the user simply enters grades for each player based on the grading criteria. As I said in my previous post, the application is pretty simple. The user submits the grades for a play by pressing Ctrl-S (or Grade->Save Play), at which point the grade-entry table is cleared and is ready for the next play.

At any point, the user can press Ctrl-W (or Grade->Write Game Report) to signal the completion of a game. At this point, the application outputs an html page that provides a grade summary for each player. Ctrl-N (or File->New Game) allows the user to start a new game.

The only other feature I provide at this point is the ability to pre-submit a list of plays when starting a new game. My brother's team already has a software package that tracks game information. This software allows them to export a list of plays which they can then just copy/paste into a dialog I provide. This results in a different "mode" in which the play field is disabled and is populated with the current play name as the user iterates through the plays. The Grader software then automatically generates the summary report after the last play has been submitted.

How?
I developed the program in C++, using the open-source version of QT (4.1) for the GUI. At some point, I want to put the application up on SourceForge so it is generally available.

The player data is stored in a designated text file and just contains the names of the players that will be graded. The grading data is stored in a designated csv file.

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