Eagle Scout Project

While this post is not about game development, I still wanted to highlight one of the first large projects I took on myself: my Eagle Scout project. The goal of this project was to create an easier way for a local church to help individuals coming to their church to find someone who was buried in the cemetery. I was brought in to help with indexing and help to come up with an easier solution to this problem.

The project seemed simple enough but quickly grew larger with more quality assurance checks along the way. First, I had groups of volunteers go through the cemetery and try to transcribe what readable text was on the stones (for modern stones this was not terrible, some stones dated back to the 1700’s and some were in German). Each tombstone had a number assigned to it, as an individual marker or a “key value”. Each stone was photographed with an index card with that assigned number as a way to cross reference data. The collected information was entered into excel spreadsheets, where the values were entered in as close to what could be read on the sheets as possible. While the excel spreadsheet may not have been the best solution for trying to sort and store data, compared to the excel spreadsheet, excel was a program that was easily accessible to individuals within the church and would allow for the church to maintain and updates this “database” for years to come. All this was tied together with a map of the tombstones that was created using AutoCAD. Measurements were taken between different stones, and plotted on graph paper to get an accurate layout for the cemetery. Although it is extremely hard to see in a overhead view that encompasses the entire cemetery; each stone has the assigned number also marked as well. All in all, the idea was that if someone called the church to ask where an individual was buried, the church historian would be able to provide them with the information off the stone, a picture of the stone, and if necessary, provide the location of headstone within the cemetery.

In the future, for my own personal project, I would love to modernize this project and make it more accessible. Currently, everything exists in hard copies physically at the church. As a good practice for web development, this whole project could be optimized and brought to the web. Additionally, the data storage would then be updated to a format that would be easier for storage and queries, and with an actual database function could be tied to a web service, and make the map interactable as well.

Please feel free to leave comments or questions below on the this topic! While not strictly game development related, I do really enjoy talking about this project and would always love thoughts or feedback on the subject matter!