Palm vs Paper Scoring

[Jim Norman]

From an entirely differnt point of view....

PALMS are GREEN!

We don't print up 70-100 scoresheets for our local match only to throw half of them away. We don't waste the paper, ink, toner or power.

It also saves immeasurable time. No I am not talking about the actual entry and checking and rechecking of score sheets. I am talking about the simple task of laying out the scoresheet for each month's match. This is not a simple task and if there is an error, we are stuck. Palm, enter the correct number of targets and steel. Done. If we need to correct it on match day, not a big deal. i can easily modify the stage in teh master and reload to that particular stage Palm.

The time saved after the match is astronomical. We don't have an onsite dedicate stats person. We all shoot, so someone (Me) has to take the scoresheets home and sort them, attempt to read them and then enter all the data, then re-read the sheets to verify the entries. Score were usually up by Wednesday. But there are times where they could be a week later. There are times when I simply have no time till later in the week. Palms? I can virtually guarantee the scores to be posted the night of the match and I have gone so far as to do them at the match, but since I can't get a connection there I can't verify all the entrants info as to class, so I generally wait.

I have ordered one thermal printer to see how well it works. If it performs as expected I will probably spring for enough to have one per stage and everyone will get a copy of their scores on the stage IF they want it. I don't think I'll print for everyone as that would defeat the "Greenness" of the Palms.

Jim

[Matt P.]

Jim,

Do you have an onsite tech person to deal with electronic issues?

[Jim Norman]

We have several people that are professional IT people, however the Stage Score system is pretty simple. Also there isn't much you can do. We have back-up palms so if we get a low battery warning, we can switch to a back-up and download the palm that is going down to the Master. That is about it really.

The system is just about 100% fool proof.

Much better than paper.

Yes, you can still make an error. It is entirely possible to enter a wrong hit or a wrong time, it is not how ever possible to not enter a time or a hit. Also you can't score extra hits on a target (2 A's and C on a target that only requires 2 hits) so the errors are greatly reduced form the human lack of input area.

I am happy enough with this system to say I'd probably have paid for it myself because of the reduced workload on me.

I do stress that pre-registration makes life easier. If you are running the match multiple times over the weekend as someone pointed out that they do, just add the additional squads. Sq1 -4 is Sat AM, Sq 5-8 is PM and so on. You can download the scores regularly, only updated data is written.

We use an online form that logs the required info in excel and auto responds to the registrant with an email containing any information we think they might want or need. About the only complaint we have had is from a few people that registered late and didn't get the squad assignment that they might have gotten the old fashioned way. We expect that we will be getting started closer to ontime in the future as well. We still have to have everyone show up and sign in to pay and sign the release. Also we need to verify that we don't wind up with a squad of one! Chronic no-shows will eventually be denied pre-registration privileges and be assigned a walk-on number and what ever squad we can fit them on. What we are currently doing is filling up to 6 of 7 squads and placing a number of walk-on slots on each squad then having an additional 'all walk-on squad' if we get a group of people that show up and haven't registered. We just put them all on the W squad (Sort of like the Group W bench)

Your mileage may vary, but I think this is the wave of the future. Palms may not be the hardware in a few years, but there will be somthing come along to replace them in time. Maybe even one of the electronic timer companies.

Jim

[lneel]

We have several people that are professional IT people, however the Stage Score system is pretty simple. Also there isn't much you can do. We have back-up palms so if we get a low battery warning, we can switch to a back-up and download the palm that is going down to the Master. That is about it really.

The system is just about 100% fool proof.

Much better than paper.

Jim, et al,

I bought external battery packs for my Palms. They hold 4 AA's batteries and will power the units pretty much for 8-10 hours. Search Google for Pocket Solutions, I think they was $8/ea.

Lee

[nm3gnr]

The Range officers at the recent Gator 2009 did an excellent job with the Stage Score system. I did not see or hear of any batteries going down or any real big complaints. A few where still new to the system, but did a great job.

We had two walk on shooters in our squad that had to be added every stage and it did not seem to be a big deal to the staff.

In my opinon, this is the way to go in the future and I can only imagine what a big releif it is to staff that have to input so many scoresheets manually.

[ALBY]

From an entirely differnt point of view....

PALMS are GREEN!

my wife drives a 3/4 suburban and the nearest grocery store is 7 miles away. my carbon footprint is like a sasquatch track. the carbon offset from my non existent score sheets isn't going to help much.

[Jim Norman]

My away from home match vehicle is my RV towing my Jeep. Carbon footprint is like Sasquatch on snowshoes.

But seriously, the Green aspect my be small as is the true savings from printing scoresheets. but the time savings is immense.

Jim

[MoNsTeR]

I skimmed the thread and didn't see this issue raised. When I go to Palm's website, the only products they show are phones, none of the old stylus-based PDAs that we're using for scoring. According to Wikipedia, they are not producing the PDA models anymore. There seem to be quite a few still out there "in the channel" as they say, probably enough to last a few years particularly if replacement batteries are available. But what happens when they're all gone?

Best guess right now is that the future of handheld computing is iPhone OS and Android. Considering an iPod Touch 8GB is only $200 brand new, comparable to the going rates for 5-year old Palms, it probably makes sense to start development on scoring apps for these systems. I'm not a huge fan of the idea of USPSA club operations being dependent on Apple, but being dependent on Palm sounds even worse.

[lneel]

I skimmed the thread and didn't see this issue raised. When I go to Palm's website, the only products they show are phones, none of the old stylus-based PDAs that we're using for scoring. According to Wikipedia, they are not producing the PDA models anymore. There seem to be quite a few still out there "in the channel" as they say, probably enough to last a few years particularly if replacement batteries are available. But what happens when they're all gone?

Best guess right now is that the future of handheld computing is iPhone OS and Android. Considering an iPod Touch 8GB is only $200 brand new, comparable to the going rates for 5-year old Palms, it probably makes sense to start development on scoring apps for these systems. I'm not a huge fan of the idea of USPSA club operations being dependent on Apple, but being dependent on Palm sounds even worse.

Noah,

You are right that Palm no longer produces PDA's any longer but there is a good supply as you noted. In fact, over the last year or so that I have been watching there are more available now than ever....I run a fair sized club and we usually run 4-5 squads at our once a month match. A club needs at least an N+1 to make sure they have a spare/backup master device.....even at the noted $200/ea for an iTouch I don't know many clubs who can afford that. With that said, the Palms (decently fast T, T2 and T3) models can be obtained in the $35-$50 range making the proposition alot more attractive. For now, this is completely workable and I hope more clubs start using Palm scoring. I know it saves me several hours each month and I love them. Some day the 8 GB iTouch's will be in the same boat and be available for that kind of pricing but now I think the clear option is Palm.

Lee

[maineshootah]

Has anyone gone to Palm scoring and decided to go back to paper?

What are to pros and cons.

Also, what kind of backup do you use for the Palm at local versus bigger matches?

Most club matches I shoot don't use the Palm.

Thanks

For a few years we kicked the idea around about them. Most of the members thought we were too small to spend that kind of $ on a scoring system, when "paper worked".

What most of the folks don't realize is that there is one dude who is stuck scoring all paper scores to the computer at the end of the match. And when you came early to setup, shoot, tear down, go home and start scoring to find that shooter B has 14 out of 20 hits recorded on the paper record..... what do you do? Even for a small club, paper scoring can take over an hour. Add rain to the mix with sheets sticking together... now it is a 2 day affair before the scores are out.

The palms take away the several mistakes.

1) The tell you when the scoring is not complete right then and there as you score.

2) The scoring at the end of the match goes from 1 - 2 hours of time to ... 3 minutes. Yeah... 3 minutes, we throw it up on the computer screen and the shooters can come over and see how they did.

3) Paper sheets get lost, palms don't.

4) Anyone who can operate a digital watch can run one of them. The software is very easy to learn.

We bought them and have been using them for about 6 months. This month's match it was 6 degrees outside, and the palms worked fine. We plan on using them all winter.

Full disclosure, we have not run a sectional or major match with them. The most at our monthly matches is about 35. If you do plan on running a major match, the Tungsten model palms are the way to go, as they are faster.

[Jim Norman]

We have just finished our first full year of using Palms to score our matches.

We use the newer system, "StageScore" not the older more expensive ASS system.

We have had very few 'issues' and none that have not been correctable after the fact.

You can change batteries in Palms. You can change screens in Palms.

We find that pre-registration and pre-squadding with additional unsquadded and squadded 'Walk-Ons' makes life easier. (For most)

We have as many as around 70 shooters on 7 stages at our matches. What used to be a several hour or multi-night chore is reduced to usually an hour or less and that includes posting and sending the updates up to USPSA. The 'pre-match' work is a bit more involved than it used to be, but less stressful than the post-match work. Where we used to have people sign up and then do the squadding the morning of the match we now just have everyone sign in and pay. We verify that the squads are populated with live bodies, not just pre-regs and away we go. We decided that we build our match based on 91 shooters, that is 13 per squad. We squad 8 people and 5 walk-ons as a rule, although since the walk-ons are added just before the Palms are loaded, this is subject to change. We try to build in one empty squad and on occasion have had a full squad of walk-ons shoot the match.

Our only problems and they are recurrent is that we'll get 8 people that all want to squad together and they'll all name one person to be the squad leader and that person fails to register, but shows up. The other is the people that want to squad with X, but both fail to register or put down a different person to squad with thinking that they person will be squadded with X and that they too will then al;so squad with X. The problem occurs when the second person doesn't put X down, fails to register or puts down the other guys name, we wind up squadding just the two of them together on a different squad and they get upset.

All in all it is worth it and just takes a small amount of training to get the methodology across.

Last situation is always the same regardless of how we run, It is the people that show up late. We used to finish the squadding and have people show up late and be pissed they couldn't shoot with their friends. now we get pre-regs that fail to show up on time and wonder why we have placed them on a different squad. (We print out squad lists so all the squads KNOW who is SUPPOSED to ge on their squad. Squad jumping slows a match down, can't have a squad of 13 when all the rest are 7. It doesn't work.

Jim

[twodownzero]

I shot at Jim's club this summer and the only down side to the palm scoring is that the palm pilots are a little slow sometimes and hard to keep up with the RO. As long as the scorer keeps the RO going at a pace where he can record, they're really easy to use and record scores.

[CHA-LEE]

We have just finished our first full year of using Palms to score our matches.

We use the newer system, "StageScore" not the older more expensive ASS system.

We have had very few 'issues' and none that have not been correctable after the fact.

You can change batteries in Palms. You can change screens in Palms.

We find that pre-registration and pre-squadding with additional unsquadded and squadded 'Walk-Ons' makes life easier. (For most)

We have as many as around 70 shooters on 7 stages at our matches. What used to be a several hour or multi-night chore is reduced to usually an hour or less and that includes posting and sending the updates up to USPSA. The 'pre-match' work is a bit more involved than it used to be, but less stressful than the post-match work. Where we used to have people sign up and then do the squadding the morning of the match we now just have everyone sign in and pay. We verify that the squads are populated with live bodies, not just pre-regs and away we go. We decided that we build our match based on 91 shooters, that is 13 per squad. We squad 8 people and 5 walk-ons as a rule, although since the walk-ons are added just before the Palms are loaded, this is subject to change. We try to build in one empty squad and on occasion have had a full squad of walk-ons shoot the match.

Our only problems and they are recurrent is that we'll get 8 people that all want to squad together and they'll all name one person to be the squad leader and that person fails to register, but shows up. The other is the people that want to squad with X, but both fail to register or put down a different person to squad with thinking that they person will be squadded with X and that they too will then al;so squad with X. The problem occurs when the second person doesn't put X down, fails to register or puts down the other guys name, we wind up squadding just the two of them together on a different squad and they get upset.

All in all it is worth it and just takes a small amount of training to get the methodology across.

Last situation is always the same regardless of how we run, It is the people that show up late. We used to finish the squadding and have people show up late and be pissed they couldn't shoot with their friends. now we get pre-regs that fail to show up on time and wonder why we have placed them on a different squad. (We print out squad lists so all the squads KNOW who is SUPPOSED to ge on their squad. Squad jumping slows a match down, can't have a squad of 13 when all the rest are 7. It doesn't work.

Jim

Jim> Why even mess with the squading in the palms before the match. We simply lay out multiple blank paper squad lists that have enough entries on the list to satisfy our "Shooters Per Squad Balancing" then let the shooters place themselves on the lists so they can shoot with whoever they want, up to the per squad shooter quantity limit. Then we make every shooter part of Squad # 99 and give the squad mom the palm and squad sign up paper and they manually go into the competitor list on the palm and change everyone on their squad to the correct number. This only take a minute or two for the squad mom to do and also serves as a "Roll Call" to make sure that all of the shooters are present for the given squad. Then for walk in's we simply tell them to tell the squad mom their walk in number so they can have them add that walk in to the squad. Using this process is super simple, and is way less pre-match hassle when trying to deal with the squading in the plams before the match.

[Jim Norman]

And you are assured of a squad that has adequate RO depth this way how?

One of the reasons we squad ahead is to be sure we don't have squads that simply cannot run themselves. Admittedly we aren't 100% in this, but we usually do OK.

Open squadding as you suggest would in my mind have us running with supersquads and pooper squads. Both of whch are not a good thing for a local match.

We like to spread out some of the better shooters amongst the rest to help educate them as to how to run through a stage and we like to make sure that we (Usually) have at least two people capable of actually running a shooter as well as a squad on each squad.

But to each their own.

Jim

[CHA-LEE]

And you are assured of a squad that has adequate RO depth this way how?

One of the reasons we squad ahead is to be sure we don't have squads that simply cannot run themselves. Admittedly we aren't 100% in this, but we usually do OK.

Open squadding as you suggest would in my mind have us running with supersquads and pooper squads. Both of whch are not a good thing for a local match.

We like to spread out some of the better shooters amongst the rest to help educate them as to how to run through a stage and we like to make sure that we (Usually) have at least two people capable of actually running a shooter as well as a squad on each squad.

But to each their own.

Jim

Jim> Maybe its different out there but here in Colorado we have never run into a "We don't have RO's for a squad" issue with the self squading methods we use. Most of the time the squad mom of the group is the primary RO. As for the hero or zero squads, we have not seen that affect the churn of the stages. The effectiveness of the squad flow through the match is more dependant upon the balance of the stages more than who is shooting on the squads. In the summer we regularly get 60 - 80 shooters at matches as well so we are pretty much in the same boat as you from a shooter quantity stand point.

The only thing we have to do some times is manually move people around on the paper squad lists if we end up with a very unbalanced squad situation. But that can be easily managed by only setting out the minimum amount of squad lists for the day and evaluating the squads before the match starts. If we have a squad list that needs to be broken up we just state "Everyone on squad X find a new squad to shoot on that keeps the squads balanced" in the shooter meeting and the shooters get it done. We are all adults and everyone needs to pitch in to make the match work. That is at least how it works around here.

[Howard762]

We bought Palms and Stagescore last year and we love them. We'll never go back to paper. Using paper to score is the equivalent of using muzzleloading pistols to shoot. Yes, those new-fangled self contained cartridges took some getting used to also.

[Flexmoney]

(not palm related, but...)

We do squad sign-up sheets at the registration table in C-ville. Over the years, we have only had to juggle the final squad lists a few times to make sure we get god RO coverage.

[Joe4d]

I think you are catering to people way to much, being so accommodating to squad assignments is just creating more problems. At some point the match director needs to well,,, direct. Squad jumping should be a match DQ under 10.6.1. I also wouldnt worry too much about late arivals, jumping through hoops for late arrivals will only create late arrivals.

Edited January 17, 2010 by Joe4d

[Jane]

(not palm related, but...)

We do squad sign-up sheets at the registration table in C-ville. Over the years, we have only had to juggle the final squad lists a few times to make sure we get god RO coverage.

But Flex..... aren't ALL ROs gods ????

[Flexmoney]

(not palm related, but...)

We do squad sign-up sheets at the registration table in C-ville. Over the years, we have only had to juggle the final squad lists a few times to make sure we get god RO coverage.

But Flex..... aren't ALL ROs gods ????

Well, if ya are gonna correct my poor typos, get it right. That would be God...with a big G

I think though...they all tend to be more gas than God.

[Nik Habicht]

I think you are catering to people way to much, being so accommodating to squad assignments is just creating more problems. At some point the match director needs to well,,, direct. Squad jumping should be a match DQ under 10.6.1. I also wouldnt worry too much about late arivals, jumping through hoops for late arrivals will only create late arrivals.

Joe,

how long have you directed a match? How many competitors? Jim's been running one of the largest, best produced monthly matches in Area 8 for close to the last ten years now....

He's got a little bit of an idea of what he's doing.....