Project Spotlight: Ontario Secondary School DanceFest
Streamlining an adjudication process to celebrate dance among students.
The Ontario Secondary School Dancefest (OSSDF) hosted their inaugural competition in 2003 at Bluevale Collegiate Institute in Waterloo, where 125 secondary students competed. Since then, the number of participants have grown exponentially. With their mission to “Educate, Encourage, and Inspire”, Dancefest’s mission is to provide an educational forum for dance students and dance educators as they develop an appreciation for the art form of dance through collaborative dance creation, performance, and workshops.
For this year’s festival, UW Blueprint members designed and developed an adjudication platform to better streamline the processes judges go through to rank student teams during the competition. Our goal was to take the judges’ time and attention away from administrative work, to focus their energy on encouraging friendly competition among the students.
We recently sat down with Laurel Brown, President at OSSDF to hear more about how our work helped impact Dancefest this year and beyond.
The Problem
The Ontario Secondary School Dancefest is an annual dance festival for secondary school students. This year, the festival saw participants representing 21 schools in 5 different categories performing 15 different dance styles. With the volume of dancers and the number of possible category combinations, a move from paper rubrics to a digitized organization system was inevitable. Grading performers, recording feedback, and ultimately deciding the award winners is tedious when there are stacks of adjudication forms. Dancefest is in need of a system that makes adjudications more portable and accessible.
The Solution
Blueprint’s ambition was to provide Dancefest with a platform that allows performance data to be easily recorded, modified, and assessed. To take full advantage of a digital organization system, Blueprint sought to implement performance filters. Instead of rifling through piles of paper, users would be able to find all performances with certain attributes using a few keystrokes.
Multi-platform experience: Blueprint’s solution to Dancefest’s needs was twofold: an Android app and a web app. The Android app would be installed on each judge’s tablet and judges would record their adjudication for each performance. Once a judge completes their evaluation, the results would become visible from the web app. Through the web app, adjudications were centralized and nested in their respective performances, making organization hassle-free.
Hands-free voice recording: Another time-consuming aspect for judges is documenting their comments for each performance by hand. Through the implementation of voice recording, judges are able to quickly record and play back comments on the spot.
Straightforward Information Architecture: With hundreds of performances in one weekend, information about each performance’s team, score, and details are organized in a way that makes it easy to understand, and sifting through the information seamlessly.
Offline-first approach: Wifi connection at festival venues have historically proven to be unreliable. To ensure that no data was lost, the solution adopts an offline-first approach. Local caches of data can be synced with the database once a tablet is back online to maintain a single source of truth.
“It was a very satisfying experience for our board to have Blueprint working to make our provincial event for high school students much better.” — Laurel Brown, President at OSSDF
The Team
The Dancefest project was filled with memorable moments. Over the last week, developers worked individually and sought advice from others when they were stuck — encouraging an environment in which everyone learned quickly and contributed greatly. Each feature demo was followed by a round of applause, revealing one of the tenets of the team: collaboration to remedy any problem and celebration for all solutions.
“We are extremely extremely proud of the project the team has made and super happy to have the team as a part of the project.” — Stephen Yang, Project Lead and Howard Yu, Project Manager
What’s Next?
The Android app and web app were used during the 2019 DanceFest with relative ease. The adjudications and data for over 250 performances were reliably stored, making the use of a paper marking system obsolete. The technology helped to improve the efficiency of Dancefest and further features have been outlined for future versions. The team continues to work with OSSDF to further improve what processes may look like for Dancefest in the future!
Ontario Secondary School Dancefest just wrapped up their 2019 festival from March 21st to the 24th. To learn more about their initiatives and how to get involved, visit https://www.ontariosecondaryschooldancefest.ca/.
