Background
The Gymnastics Software company is located in Belgium, Western-Europe. In Belgium most sport clubs are non-profit organizations working with volunteers, and so is our gymnastics club GymKa (Gym-Kalmthout). We were training in the municipal sport hall that we shared with all other sporting clubs which meant that every day we had to place and remove all apparatuses.

Not pleased with that situation, we started looking for a hall we could rent the whole year through. We found one but could not pay the rent, unless we came up with something. The idea was to organize gymnastics summer camps and earn ourselves the money needed for the rent. Tom and Lieve had been coaching at Bela Karolyi’s Gymnastics Camps in 2002 and with that experience in mind, we thought we could pull this off.

We planned to organize six gymnastics camps and that is when Tom decided to quit his job as developer because there was no way he could get enough vacation from his employer. When not working for the club, he started to tackle a problem that nobody had solved before: digitizing the WAG symbols. This was the beginning of gymnastics software.

WAG Symbols
For those unfamiliar with the WAG symbols I will explain what they are. WAG stands for Women Artistic Gymnastics: it is the Olympic discipline of gymnastics where women perform on vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor. Although gymnastics is performed the same way on either side of the globe, every gymnastics element has a different name in different languages. This makes it difficult in international competitions when judges of different nationalities need to communicate with each other regarding the elements performed by the gymnasts. The solution to this problem came from the East-German (early 80's) judges. They had developed a series of symbols that represent the gymnastics elements. Using these symbols it was very easy to write down a gymnastics exercise while it was being performed, and even important: all other judges could read the exercise.

The WAG technical committee decided to use these symbols world wide. Today, more than 20 years later, every judge in the world uses these symbols. The use of these symbols is not limited to judges, because coaches too found them great to work with.

WAG Symbols and computers
Today we live in the computer age, and many judge and coach uses the computer for work. For example, the FIG Code of Points is written with a computer, or the sheets used on an course for judges, is written on a computer. The big problem is that there is no keyboard in the world that has the WAG symbols on its keys (in contrary to tumbling where they developed a symbol set with characters that can be found on any keyboard: o---.2). So how could the WAG symbols be inserted into a document? Only one way was possible: draw all symbols on a piece of paper, scan them and save as pictures, and insert these pictures in your document.

This approach works, but has many drawbacks. To name a few: pictures take a considerable amount of disk storage, they cannot be scaled without loss of quality, the cannot change color, and imagine how to find the symbol you need: somewhere between those hundreds picture files is the one you need.

I remember a situation during the international judge coarse in Holland, 2006. These international courses are conducted by a member of the WAG technical committee, and they have nice documents where every exercise is written down in symbols, with the value and execution faults below the symbol. These documents were made in MS Excel, and were indeed very clear to us, except for the people in the back of the class room. They asked to enlarge the document so they could read what was on the projection screen. No problem said Anca (the WTC member) and clicked the zoom tool of excel. Everything enlarged beautiful: the element values, the execution faults, ... except the WAG symbol pictures of course. The stayed at the same place rendering the document absolute, because the element values did no longer correspond to the symbol above it. That is one drawback of using pictures!

Next time you attend an international judging coarse, and the document is enlarged without messing up the position of the symbols, you know they used WAG Symbols from gymnastics software!

The solution(s)
As a software developer, I was familiar with the way a computer handles different languages. I knew how a computer was able to display for example Chinese characters along with Latin characters, and I knew a computer could display WAG symbols using the same techniques. When you browse the WAG Symbols pages of this website, you will find a more detailed explanation, but for now you should know that we gave every single symbol a unique number. The second part of the solution required a font. A font is a file that tells your printer and computer how a symbol should be painted/printed. It took me months to design the font, and when I first presented it to the FIG, they found the symbols "too thick", and they were right, so it was back to the drawing board. Giving a unique number to the symbols, is something we did at the very last moment, because we wanted to have all elements in the font, also the elements that are no longer performed. That brought many extra work.

A table defining the element numbers and a font defining the look of the symbols are only half of the work. The biggest technological challenge was to find a way to make them available to the computer user. The WAG Symbols application as we sell it today on our website, is actually solution number three. What were the other solutions?

My initial idea was to use the same technique that is used for languages that have hundreds of characters like Chinese. The software industry developed so called Input Method Editors (IME). It is not easy to explain how they work, because they all differ. But the IME that I planned to build, would work like this: every symbol has a real name or code. When you start typing the name, a list would occur beside the text cursor showing all candidate symbols for the name you are typing. If you see the symbol in the list, you can click it and it would replace the text you were typing. At first it seemed to be the perfect solution, especially because Microsoft had just released a new technology (Text Services Framework) that enabled the IDE to be used as part of the operating system. Although this IME can be of great use - it could support voice recognition and hand writing recognition - it was not the perfect solution, because every language would have different names for there elements. For an application that is to be used world wide, this is definitely not the way to go.

So I turned my attention to something new: Microsoft had just released a tool that enabled developers to write there own keyboard driver in a blink of an eye (I can't believe I wrote this). With this tool I could create a keyboard where every key is assigned a WAG symbol. There are less or more 50 keys on a keyboard, and with the use of (a combination of) Shift, Alt and Control keys, a single keyboard could host 300 different symbols. For all WAG symbols, it would take around 20 different keyboards. People using different languages on there computer know the language bar control, where you select the language you are currently working with. This makes sure that the keyboard holds the characters of the chosen language. For the WAG Symbols, you would click the language bar, select one keyboard layout out of 20, and start typing the symbols. For that you would need an out print of the keyboard, because otherwise you don't know what symbol is under what key. Hmmm, given a symbol, you need to find out what keyboard layout supports that symbol, and then find the key combination to enter the symbol. This could take quit a long time for one symbol. So again it was back to the drawing board.

The third and for now final solution, was the "Microsoft Symbol" approach. Who ever tried to insert a funny symbol into his application, could open a small application named "Symbol". That application showed all characters in a font, and it enabled the user to copy and paste it into the application. Of course I had tried this with the WAG Symbols font, but it seemed that the "Symbol" application could not display characters that are as big as the WAG Symbols. With only a portion of the symbol visible, it was useless. Convinced that this was the way to go, I build my own "Symbol" application. It has many advantages over he standard tool of Microsoft, because it enables me to take away the burden of fonts for the user (in Microsoft Symbol, you would select the WAG symbols font and select the character range), and more important, I could link the symbols to a database that contains information about the symbol: it's name, it's value, a video fragment, etc... and make that info available to the user while he is browsing the elements.

The making of
Mid 2005, I thought it was time to inform the FIG about the software I was working on. I needed the FIG to work with me, because it was very, very important that only one encoding table exists in the world, I mean the table that provides the WAG elements with a unique number. If I write a document with one table, and you read it using another table, you would see different symbols (like I write "ABC" on my computer, and you read "GW$" on your computer). This can be prevented by defining one and only one table world wide.

I contacted Nelli Kim, president of the WTC, and explained what I was doing. She was very interested and invited me for a meeting in Aarhus, October 2005. I drove the whole way down to Denmark, and had my meeting with Miss Kim. She said it was a pity I didn't had this software a year earlier, because at that time the FIG was working on the new Code of Points and lots of documents with WAG Symbols had to be rewritten. The version I demonstrated was the keyboard layout approach. Later I forgot about the keyboard layouts and started to work on the WAG Symbols application.

In 2006, I followed the international judge coarse. It was a complete new code, so it took a lot of time studying and practicing. In the summer there were the gymnastics camps, and my daughter Louise asked for attention every day more and more. The result was that only in October 2006, I had a version of WAG Symbols. Again I went to Aarhus, Denmark, because they hosted the 2006 World Championships Gymnastics. I met Nelli Kim for the second time and she introduced me to Hardy Fink, a member of the FIG staff. He was impressed by the demonstration I gave, and asked me to talk with the director of the Men's Technical Committee, Adrian Stoica. Because the Men's Technical Committee do not agree on a standard set of symbols, I was not interested in doing so. I thought, maybe when they see what can be done with the WAG symbols, they start working on there own set of symbols, and then I want to talk about digitizing them, just as we did for the WAG symbols.

With the software almost ready, I had to find a way to prevent software piracy. I had been working on the WAG Symbols since 2004, and I was really short on cash by now. So I decided to include anti-piracy mechanisms to the WAG Symbols application. This caused the release date to be postponed by months. Also, I needed to sell the software via a website, so I had to figure out how to build such a website. Finally, when you are reading this, things were ready and the WAG Symbols application was released to the world.

In the mean time, the FIG has recognized the WAG Symbols Encoding Table designed by gymnastics software as the one and only valid encoding table.