Champion Zone: Instant Sports Challenge

Dates

February 2002 — January 2003

Principal Investigator

Abel Sanchez (PI) with Hai Ning

Problem

With approximately 300 active tennis players and an equal number of squash players in the MIT community, it is often difficult to find a sports partner of comparable skill that can fit into your schedule.

Goal

To create an online instant matching and notification web service to facilitate the instantaneous challenge and acceptance of tennis/squash matches at MIT.

Overview

To find a partner for a tennis game with Champion Zone, a user inputs his/her skill level, preferred court location and the preferred time and day for a game. When another person signs on who is a good match, the first user is notified. The potential partner then accepts or rejects the match, and the other user is immediately notified through his or her preferred method. The notification system has been written generally enough to communicate with various clients, such as MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, email, cell phone text and voice messaging.

Possible uses for Champion Zone include term book exchanges, notifications of class postings, discussion forum entries, and group project events. The service framework can be generalized to other 1-to-1 and 1-to-n relationships to become a campus wide instant notification service. The framework is general enough to accommodate an online store, where people can request to be notified when new products meeting their specifications become available for sale.

Links

Champion Zone: Instant Sports Challenge