During the world cup I ran a competition to see who on the team was the best at predicting the results of world cup. Unlike everyone else in my company my competition used R Shiny as an interface and was hosted on an Amazon virtual machine.
I wanted to make the competition as simple as possible for me to run while making it easy for everyone to update the results so I settled on this format:
- I provided a csv template of al of the group stage games containing 4 columns
- Team A name
- Team B name
- Team A score
- Team B score
- Everyone had to fill that score sheet in and save their entry in a given folder
- The then had to add the name of their predictions to an entry form sheet
- Then I ran my R code to upload and score all of the predictions.
This was the initial format, and it worked. But it did involve me having to email out a table of results every day which didn’t quite feel right. So I made an alteration
- All of the predictions were uploaded to the internet
- An AWS machine was set up to run R and R shiny
- The R code mas modified to work in shiny
Now all I needed to do was change the actuals.csv with the new results and upload this and then everything just updated itself. This worked much better.
I did try to get Rstudio to read the predictions from my Dropbox but that only worked once then the link broke down so I stuck with the csv method. The shiny league had a league table and then a chart of the predictions. The chart was made using plotly.