Building a Carnival

Events, competitors, scheduling and rollover.

Start here

Grade or age: which grouping fits your school?

Choose year-level or age-grouped events, understand calculation dates and combined age brackets, and check what can change later.

Browse in order

Guide

Use last year's carnival as your starting point

Update the school roster, create this year's carnival, copy eligible events and check the new programme and entrants.

Tutorial

Create a carnival

Create a carnival with grade or age grouping, dates and event-completion settings.

Tutorial

Edit a carnival’s settings

Change an existing carnival’s details and check that the new settings were saved.

Tutorial

Register every student in a carnival

Guide

Choose how to add events

Choose between adding one event, bulk creation, a file import, or copying events from an earlier carnival.

Tutorial

Copy events from an earlier carnival

Reuse event definitions from an earlier carnival and check the new event list.

Tutorial

Add, edit and delete an event

Create a carnival event, edit its details, and remove an event entered in error.

Tutorial

Bulk-create events

Create a set of carnival events from selected divisions, genders and year levels, then check every combination.

Tutorial

Import events from CSV or Excel

Import individual events and their competitors from a CSV or Excel file.

Tutorial

Add and remove competitors from an event

Add students to an individual event and remove an entry made in error.

Tutorial

Create teams and assign team members

Add a house team to a relay event and choose the students in it.

Tutorial

Import competitors into events

Use a CSV or Excel file to add selected students to existing individual events.

Tutorial

Assign competitors to lanes

Choose an event venue, assign competitors to its house lanes, and check empty positions.

Tutorial

Create an event pool and its first heats

Follow an event pool from creation through nominations and first-round heats to the Events list.

Tutorial

Bulk-create event pools

Create event pools for several gender and grade groups, then verify every pool.

Guide

Choose an event-pool distribution method

Choose whether to mix nominees from different houses across events or group them by house.

Tutorial

Automatically add eligible competitors to a pool

Turn on automatic nominations and see students appear in an empty event pool.

Tutorial

Manage nominations manually

Add students to a manual event pool, then reorder or remove nominations as needed.

Tutorial

Automatically manage first-round events

Let Houseplay create and size first-round events from a pool’s nominations.

Tutorial

Advance competitors through heats and finals

Create heats and a final, record the heat results and see the finalists advance.

Tutorial

Build the carnival program

Order carnival events, then set their start times and the gaps between them.