Cyndi Dixon
Athletics and Swimming Results Sheet
Tararua College
Year 12 Senior Technology, ICT – Full year project
Teacher: Diana Eagle
Cyndi was new to Technology in Year 12, although she had done Information Management in Year 11. As her project for the year, Cyndi decided to improve the spreadsheet teachers used when recording the school's athletics and swimming sports results. She wanted it to be more user-friendly, have better and more accessible information about placings and house points, and be printable for easy reading.
Starting with little understanding of technological practice Cyndi set up her project with guidance from her teacher. She talked to all the staff involved with sports, including sports coordinators, recorders, the IT manager and the ICT teacher who devised the original spreadsheet. These teachers became her focus group. A consultant from a local computer business was available to advise her on what to do to develop a practical solution.
At first Cyndi considered developing a database and examined two – a sports database and one supplied by her consultant – but soon realised she did not have adequate knowledge or time. She decided instead to create a spreadsheet, and use a variety of formulae to produce the information she wanted. She then worked on improving her knowledge and skills, including doing a spreadsheet unit from her Computing class.
Cyndi spent a lot of time developing her spreadsheet and had regular meetings with her consultant, and feedback from her focus groups. She developed a mock-up to demonstrate its fitness for purpose, and had each teacher in the focus group test it and comment on its viability. Comments were positive and feedback, particularly from the ICT teacher, helped her make neccesary improvements.
As her final solution, Cyndi produced a CD with separate template spreadsheets for both athletics and swimming events and an instruction guide. Features included:
- a formula which automatically showed the age of the student as at the first of January when their date-of-birth was entered,
- an auto-filter to enable users to see a continuously updated tally of house points
- an auto-filter to identify the overall champions in each age group, with formulae showing top ten, in-house, gender or age-group winners.
Cyndi was pleased with her project and is looking forward to seeing the spreadsheets used for the first time: "It will give me a chance to see it working and to remove any kinks."
Teacher comment
Cyndi's project demonstrated very good technology. She was working in a senior Technology class with a Food Technology specialist as her teacher and no other student working in her area of Technology. She used outside experts to help her develop her solution and was guided by her teacher in how to go about her practice. Her project clearly showed that a good technology project can be developed by students in all manner of areas, even when not a specialist area for the teacher.
