Course Design and Setting Guidelines
Start early and think about what you want to accomplish. Your responsibilities are outlined in this guidelines document. Then use these contacts:
- Obtain the latest map for your venue by contacting: bob@neooc.com – More details on obtaining and working with the maps are outlined here: Information (get the latest OCAD viewer here: https://www.ocad.com/en/viewer/)
- Many venues require that the control placement be approved by a park naturalist a month or more prior to the event. This ensures that sensitive park areas are protected. Contact howard@neooc.com or bob@neooc.com for specific contact information for the particular venue.
- Contact fred@neooc.com for flags and other equipment. We now have enough ePunch Control flags and finger sticks to handle all of the courses including White (the beginners starting course). See this document (especially the 2nd page for details about he ePunch system: ePunch
The following tools and resources can be useful:
Course Design Workshop/Clinic(s) Resources
2019: The most recent Course Design Clinic was given in March 2019 and led by Bob Boltz. This one day clinic focused on the use of Purple Pen (PP) to design courses. Here are the various handouts and presentations used in the Clinic:
- Design Clinic Slides
- Purple Pen Workflow
- How Do I Design Courses (guildelines)
- Course Design Clinic Information
These example OCAD maps were used as base maps for PP. Unfortunately, because of WordPress security, the .ocd file extension must be substituted for the current file extension after downloading.
In general, several exercises were given the create “easy”, “hard”, and score courses on these simplified maps. The final exercise was to add a Start and Finish location and then 3 to 7 controls forming the different required courses (White thru Red and a Score). All while following the guidelines.
2017: The previous course design workshop organized by NEOOC was in 2017. It also was a one day course, covering many aspects and challenges of Course Design including control feature selection, levels of courses, and the Purple Pen Windows program. One of the leaders, Andreas Johansson, gathered the notes and materials from the workshop and put them in a blog entry that can be found here:
http://neooc.com/course-design-clinic-2017-resources/
2016: Another course design workshop was in 2016:
http://neooc.com/course-design-workshop-resources-27feb2016/
Purple Pen
Purple Pen is the premier course design software for orienteering. Purple Pen makes it easy to design orienteering courses and their associated control descriptions (clue sheets). It is also can be a great help for planning control setting and collection activities.
Design your courses visually — directly on any OCAD map. (Also PDF and image files may be use as the base map. A map scale must be entered in this case. See below for more explanation of map scale.) View the course and the control descriptions at the same time, and simply click on the control descriptions to set the correct description for each control. Purple Pen automatically does all the busywork.
GPS Orienteering
This Android phone App is primarily targeted for Orienteers who want to practice Orienteering without using actual flags set at the venue. However, it can be extremely useful for vetting your control positions. Use this App on your phone with the GPS active and you can see your exact position on an OCAD map (using the “assist” mode of the App). With your course as designed with Purple Pen, one can create:
- Route Gadget files (includes a zoomed-in map image focusing on the controls).
- A GPS file (GPX) of the control positions (GPS long-lat coordinates for each control).
Then by uploading these files to the App, one can see the Orienteering map, the controls, and a blue dot showing your exact position. Great for vetting control positions!
There are two versions of the GPS Orienteering App, the Run version is free and is meant to be used with the Full version by using the Map/Course Code. The Full version is about $5 and can generate courses and Map/Course Codes for sharing.
https://play.google.com/store/
https://play.google.com/store/
Clue
Clue is a Windows-based program that simplifies the task of creating control description sheets for orienteering events, if the Purple Pen Program is not being used.
http://www.dvoa.org/events/evdir/clue/index.php
Control Description Symbols
Download/display PDF: IOF Control Descriptions 2018
Single page summary: Older IOF Control Descriptions 2004 for reference
Map Scale
The idea of Map Scale is to allow an Orienteer to measure a distance on the map and then know exactly what that distance is in the real world. For example, three centimeters (cm) is measured on the printed map as the distance between two buildings (using the ruler on the edge of the compass). For a 1:10,000 scale map, this scales up to 30,000 cm in the real world or 300 meters between the buildings (doing the easy conversion of centimeters to meters).
Regarding determining and entering the Map Scale for PDF or image files used as base maps for Purple Pen: the scale is entered after the map file (e.g. venue.pdf) is chosen, during the Event Setup Wizard for the PP project. This can be changed later, under the Event tab and Map File selection. Possible ways to determine the Map Scale of non OCAD files: If the map has a scale printed on it, that can be measured (in cm for example) on a printout and then made into a ratio depending on what is the scale’s stated distance. Another method is to measure on the printed map the distance between two objects and then measure the actual distance between those two objects via Google Earth or Open Street maps.
For example, back to the distance between the two buildings. If the distance measured on the map is three (3) centimeters, and Google Earth shows the distance as 450 meters. Then the map scale is 1:15,000. Converting the 450 meters to centimeters gives 45,000 centimeters (for consistency of units). 45,000 divided by 3 is 15,000. And thereby a 1:15,000 scale map.
The Printed Map Scale is a different and separate entry used at print time to do final scaling for mismatched paper size situations. This value defaults to the regular Map Scale.
If the map appears to be non proportional, then it may not be suitable for use as a base map. For example, a camp map that is shows items like campsites in nearby relationship to one another, but does not show accurate distances consistently across the whole map, would not be suitable to use as a base map.