Tournaments are the culmination of the DI season where teams get to show their solutions to this year's DI Challenges and their skills at solving Instant Challenges.


The Resource Area contains a number of features to assist in running a DI tournament.  With COVID-19 better managed, the Resource Area is back to mainly dealing with in-person tournaments where teams present their solution to their Team Challenge and solve an Instant Challenge live at a tournament.  You might see a latent reference to virtual tournaments, but the Digital Open is the only supported virtual tournament as of the 2022-23 season.


Let's review a few key features of a tournament and the support offered by the Resource Area.


Online Forms:


Teams have needed to fill out forms since the inception of the program.  These forms are now online and access through the Resource Area. Teams access their online forms via the teams=>my tournaments page.  Tournament Data Forms, Expense Reports and the Prep Checklist are available here as soon as a team is listed as participating in one or more tournaments.  While the collecting of this information is done by the Resource Area, a tournament can choose if they want to present this information to Appraisers on paper or electronically through Mobile Scoring.


Tournament Timeline:


Tournaments have always had timelines.  The 2 key dates the Resource Area tracks are:

  1. the actual date of the tournament
  2. if your tournament is using Prep Pre-check, the deadline to submit your online forms


Mobile Scoring:


Mobile Scoring collects Appraiser scores using mobile devices such as cell phone, tablets and laptops rather than the traditional approach of recording scores on paper. A tournament can choose if it wants to use Mobile Scoring. In 2022 over 100 tournament did use mobile scoring.  Your choice will certainly impact the running of your tournament.


While these key tournament factors affect everyone at a DI tournament, how they affect you will likely be determined by the role you play at a tournament.  We've tried to divide the help based on roles.  Our 3 major constituents are:


  1. teams participating in the tournament
  2. appraisers judging the tournament
  3. officials running the tournament



As an Appraiser



As an Official responsible for Tournament Setup


Tournament officials such as a Regional Director or Regional Challenge Master get involved in the tournament well before the day of competition.  The Resource Area supports these officials by:


  • publishing the date and location of the tournament (timelines for tournaments)
  • adding the teams that will compete at the tournament
  • creating the schedule of teams as to when Team Challenge and Instant Challenge solutions are presented in-person
  • building the appraiser teams and indicating which items of the challenges the teams solve each appraiser will score


Once this information is captured in the Resource Area, the Resource Area in turn can:

  • initialize the DI Scoring Program with the information needed to score the tournament
  • initialize each scoring appraiser's Mobile Client
  • monitor the scoring of a tournament 


Given that these roles vary considerably, we will describe the Resource Area support for each group separately.