Football Tactics Explanation System

Software	Object oriented language with good GUI facilities, JavaScript and HTML5
Covers	Graphic application development, HCI, football
Skills Required	Programming, some interest in graphics and HCI, understanding the tactics of your chosen game
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ????

Brief Description

What's really going on tactically in football may be hard to follow when you're watching what the man with the ball is doing. But the defenders' collective positioning and attackers' running off the ball may be just as important. How can you deepen your understanding of tactics and collective movement, as a player or interested spectator? How can you teach tactical understanding? How can you use software technology to enable people to teach tactical understanding?

The development environments for tools like Director and Flash and Silverlight provide very good ways to lovingly hand-craft animations that can be run as web pages or as apps (give or take Apple's unwillingness to support Flash). However these are flexible general purpose tools for constructing the widest possible range of different animations. The challenge of this project is to build a development environment for making animations that is limited and customized to the particular requirements of explaining football tactics, that enables its users to do just what they need quickly and easily.

Part of the challenge here is in doing some quite sophisticated interface implementation using the language and GUI builder of your choice. Another part of the challenge is in understanding some quite subtle user requirements.

Extensions

Instead of focusing on building a good-looking, effective development environment for tactics animations, you could turn this into an AI project by keeping the interface side to the minimum needed to have something to show, and implementing interactive movement of players by the user with automated rule-based responses by other players. (Or take this to its logical conclusion by doing the Team Game for Intelligent Agents project.)

Variants

For a combination of deep tactical profundity and blink-and-you've-missed-it action, interpret the project title as referring to the game the Americans call Football. There's an urgent need for a way to educate the semi-initiated in how this cross between chess and wrestling works, but there's a lot to understand about the tactical subtlety of what just looks like a lot of pushing and shoving.

Or maybe a completely different game...

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