When visiting other SAISA schools, one thing that we always noticed is that they had a big board for their school swimming and track and field records. I thought that having one in OSC would be a nice way to keep track of all of the hard work put in over the years and potentially help motivate people to work hard to get a school record (as some SAISA records are hard to beat). Nelithra, coming from another SAISA school (AISD) that has school record boards, also agreed that our school needed one so we decided to work together to do so. The way that we decided to split up the work was for me to compile the records and for Nelithra to design the board.
COMPILING THE DATA
The major difficulty in the school record board is ensuring that we have some tentative records to beat. Therefore, the method that we used was to look back at SAISA times for the past 5 years and choose the fastest times. Thankfully, Ms. Sue did all of the track and field records therefore I just had to focus on swimming. Although it appears to be easy, compiling the times was a difficult feat as I had find the fastest individual for each event and each age group for every year. As there are 11 events, 5 individuals per age group and 6 age groups every year sorting through and ensuring that it was accurate was a difficult feat. My strategy was to write down the individual and their fastest time for all of the events every year and then compare it with the next years time, if the fastest individual in the following year had a better time I would then replace the time and name. All in all, this took over 6 hours to do but I eventually had a consolidated list of the fastest times in the past 5 years on excel.
DESIGNING THE BOARD
The first step that Nelithra took in the process of designing the board was to make an online version using excel as well that could be easily accessed and updated by the coaches. The board was made using OSC colours of blue and white and formatted so you could see the event, the record holder and their time. This is an important intermediate step before creating a physical board as it allows the board to be changed quickly with new records as replacing it on a physical board could take some time. Additionally, this electronic version has the same design as what the physical board would have.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
This CAS project combined elements of activity, creativity and service and therefore is a great culmination of what I have learnt throughout the CAS program. The primary learning outcomes that I was able to accomplish were:
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience, we took initiative and came up with an innovative idea for our school and contacted the athletic department for resources and approval.
LO4: Show commitment to, and perseverance in, CAS experiences, I have been a part of SAISA swimming and SAISA track and field for 8 years therefore I felt as though it was important to give back before I left
LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognise the benefits of working collaboratively, Nelithra and I worked together in order to allocate our skills in order to create a good final product.