Much of Global Finals Awards is covered in the general help library.  This includes an explanation of the Global Finals Awards process for appraisers, ICMs, and Program Directors.


This topic covers setup for Awards and preparing for Closing Ceremonies.  This is typically handled by Score Room and the DIHQ Resource Area developers.  These actions are on the Official=>awards; Misc Actions page that requires elevated privileges to access.


Awards Setup


The Awards system is initialized in a few steps at or before the tournament (in Officials=>awards, Misc  Action red tab)


Cleaning up Team Information


Teams are identified by a team-number, organization (ie membership name), team name, and location. Sometimes organization, team names, and locations need reviewing to make sure they meet the expectation of closing ceremonies.  Locations are expect to be a city or town not including province or state (we get this information from the team's affiliate).  There are a few tools to help clean up this information.


Event=>schedule teams, Misc Actions red tab, Fix Locations will search teams for locations that don't fit our expectations.  If you click on the Fix Locations button, it will search the location of each team for commas.  The last comma and text following the comma is removed from the location.  For example: Londonderry, NH will be replaced with Londonderry.  The feature will display each change it makes.  If the change is inappropriate, you can set it back using the method below.  To change Londonderry, NH, USA to Londonderry, this action needs to be run twice.


This information can also be edit from Teams=>edit.  After selecting the team to edit, the page will show how this team will be presented and allow you to change the organization, team name, and/or location.


Test Awards Flags


This is typically done by the DIHQ Resource Area developers a week or two in advance of the tournament.  The test checks that we have an affiliate flag for any teams that might be displayed in the Closing Ceremonies slides.  Click the Test Awards Flags button on the Misc Actions pane to run the test. The test displays each affiliate with competing teams at this year's Global Finals.  If a flag is displayed in the table, that affiliate flag is known.  If blanks, an affiliate flag should be added. The process of adding a flag is covered here.


Initializing the Award System


Clicking the Init Tournament button will initialize/reinitialize the awards system for Global Finals.  Prior to doing this, the Challenge-Level Status and Output Results pane will not show any challenges.  After clicking this button both of these panes should show the controls discussed in the general help library.


Open and Closing Awards


Use the Awards Process Status dropdown to control the Awards process.  Prior to tournament, the awards system is typically closed as appraisers would not be entering awards at that time.  It gets opened at the start of the tournament.  While the Awards process can be set to closed following the tournament, ICMs and Program Directors do close each challenge-level as they go through the process of reviewing and approving the awards, so that keeps appraisers from generating awards late in the process.


Setting IC Awards Status


Instant Challenge typically does not award Special Awards.  Instead in recent years they have recognized the top scores for Instant Challenge.  Using the dropdown IC Chal-Lev Status, you can set all IC rooms as not issuing awards or clear this status. Select the status wanted and click the Set button to the right to set the Special Awards status for all IC challenge levels.


Importing Place Finishes


Once the tournament has been scored by the Scoring Program, the place finishes need to be imported into the Awards system.  The place finishes and Special Awards can then be integrated to run the Closing Ceremonies.  This is the purpose of the Import Place Results area of Misc Actions.


In the Scoring Program for Global Finals, you can create this file by clicking Create EMS export file on the File menu.  The file contains a row for each team placing.  The columns in a row include:


  • challenge letter of the team -- eg A for the technical challenge, PO for project outreach
  • level of the team (EL, ML, SL, UL)
    • when a challenge level splits, the level is followed by -I or -D
  • the team number
  • the place finish (1-10 with no indication of ties other than the same place finish)
  • the ic-finish if resulting in an award (typically just 1 for first place)
  • a 4 digit time (hhmm) when the information was exported


The import process operates as follows:


  1. the entire file is read and checked including
    1. that the team number is a team that advanced to the tournament
    2. that the team is in the correct challenge, level and site
    3. any problems are reported
  2. once the data in the file is found to be correct, import
    1. adds any new team
    2. updates with a new time stamp any team with changed data
    3. deletes any team previous imported but no longer in the current import file


There are 4 buttons associated with importing place finishes:


  • Import: attempts to import from the file selected
  • Reset Places: clears out all the places
  • Release Import Lock: the import process takes out a lock when it starts the import process and releases the when done.  This prohibits more that one import happening at once.  If the process errors for some reason, this button will release the lock.
  • Export Test Data: creates a test .CSV file in the format expected by Import.  The place finishes are randomly chosen from teams attending Global Finals this year.  This is useful for testing that Closing Ceremonies has been configured correctly for this year's Global Finals.