As a 4 year member of the Ohio State Marching Band I've seen a
lot of the great things that we do on the field, but also a lot
of the things that we could improve on, and one of the
things that myself and my friend Charlie king saw as band members
was the massive amount of paper that we use every year.
It was like, what if we use tablets instead of paper, and we
had probably been talking about something like this before
because it's extremely frustrating, especially as
someone that's even a little bit conservation minded to see all
of the iterations, all of the hundreds of thousands of pieces
of paper that are printed.
So we decided, you know what if we made this work digitally
since that's where everything is going anyway.
And so as we developed our idea more we set up a meeting, a
presentation with the director, assistant director, some people
at the university, Digital First, and some other people at
the Arts and Sciences department, and they really
approved of the project, thought it was a great idea and said
"Let's move forward, let's give it a try".
They came to me, Charlie and Ryan, and said "We've got this
great idea, we waste so much paper around here" and I said I
agree, tell me what the idea is and they said "well, we can do
everything on the iPad".
It was really remarkable to see how well thought out they had
this whole plan for the iPads, from how they were gonna fund
it, how it would be sustainable over time, really how it would
reduce waste in the band and really to gain money back from
the lack of having to pay for paper or copying.
It was really incredible to see that two students brought that
to us.
We learn a new show every week, we have a lot of new things
coming out every week.
Time is critical for the marching band.
We only have two hours every day Monday through Friday for a
given week to put out a show that you see on a Saturday
afternoon.
And what we found was that the iPad was so intuitive that
students started innovating way outside of the bounds of what we
had envisioned originally.
The squad leaders have thought of things like videotaping the
marching band during rehearsal, a close up view of maybe how
their picking up their feet or snapping their turns, things
that are really critical and useful feedback.
We found this drill software that took in files from the
drill writing software that our directors already use, and turns
them into this animated drill that you get to watch.
So this has been probably the biggest innovation that we've
seen in our project from what we previously did in the marching
band.
It allows the band member to select their own marcher, see
their actual coordinate on the field as the formation is
transforming in front of them.
You see everything unfold right in front of you, which is
something that we've never ever been able to see.
So on a Monday when we go out to the field we already know what
the sets look like, we already know how the transitions look,
things that we would not get from paper.
It's gonna help the students reduce the stress they have of
learning that music, put out better shows on Saturday, and
improve the way that we do things on and off the field.
I'm really excited that we were really able to leverage a whole
team and resources across the university who came together
really quickly, and came together because they wanted to
help these students make a possibility a reality.
The students received a Sustainability Grant that made
it possible for them to buy the technology and to save and to
create a greener and more renewable, sustainable
environment.
And so, we worked with the Office of the Chief Information
Officer, the College of Business, College of Arts and
Sciences and we worked with the technology team to take a space
in the stadium that did not have internet access and turn it into
a wireless access point really quickly.
Arts and Sciences technology services played a role in
defining what kind of profile would be deployed to the iPads,
we helped deploy all apps that would be used with the band, and
we also helped to deploy and configure security on the iPads.
I think the best thing overall is that this was a student
initiative and a student idea.
And you know our motto around here is tradition through
innovation.
And not only did they come up with the idea, but they
instituted the idea, and made it work.
It's one thing to say "well, I have an idea, we should do
this", and it's a totally different thing to take the
leadership role and develop a program and create this whole
thing that has really revolutionized everything that
we do.