Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk Programming

Chapter 35. Scoreboard: A 15-Minute Perl/Tk Application

Jon Orwant

In this article, I’ll walk you through the scoreboard application I wrote for my Internet Quiz Show. (If you’re interested in the show itself, the questions and answers will be available in the third Best of TPJ book, Games, Diversions & Perl Culture.) The application is a simple demonstration of Text, Button, and Frame widgets, as well as huge fonts.

The Need

As an undergraduate, I participated in College Bowl—a quiz competition for college students to test their trivia knowledge. Later, as a graduate student, I became a judge for College Bowl contests, during which I created an annual Perl Quiz Show for the O’Reilly Perl Conferences. As the conference grew in size and scope (becoming the Open Source Convention), my quiz show changed accordingly, and was rechristened the Internet Quiz Show.

In “real” College Bowl, there is a team of officials: the moderator, who reads the questions; the judge, who determines if player answers are correct; the recognizer, who calls out the name of the player who buzzed in first; and one or two scorekeepers who track the score on both paper and a chalkboard.

However, on stage at the O’Reilly conference, there’s no team of officials—I have to do everything. Combining these roles isn’t too hard, but I can’t walk over to a chalkboard every time the score changes—it would take too much time, and people in the back of the 1,500-seat auditorium wouldn’t be able to see. So I created a graphical ...