If you enter any racquets club, often the first thing you see is a wall-mounted ladder showing a long list of members and their rankings. SFU computing science students tackled this ubiquitous ladder system, bringing it into the digital age.

Two teams of students paired up with the Vancouver Racquets Club to improve their ladder-based ranking system to track mixed doubles badminton players.

The club approached SFU’s software systems program in computing science looking for a better way of managing weekly tournaments so that player seeding and upcoming matches could be communicated online.

“This was a fantastic experience for the students because working with a local community group not only gave the students real-world development experience, which is great for the start of their careers, but also allowed them to see their work in use within the community,” said Brian Fraser, senior lecturer in computing science.

Previously, teams would sign up, be matched, and record their place in the ladder using physical tags on a peg board mounted to the gym wall. A huge benefit of the digital system is that players will no longer have to physically go to the club to see when their next game takes place or sign up with their partner.

Students were part of the Software Development Methods course and grouped into Team Alpha or Team Beta during the semester to create a solution. Each team worked with Vancouver Racquets Club to learn about project requirements, test early prototypes with the club, and in the end each presented their web-based solution for digital sign-up and ladder monitoring.

The Vancouver Racquets Club selected one group’s project to implement – the one developed by Team Beta. In fall 2016, two of the original students from Team Beta, NoorUllah Randhawa and Alex Land, are continuing to work on the project and supporting the roll out of the digital system to the club’s members.