Hi all,

For my university's debate club, I was asked to create an application to assign debate sessions and I'm having some difficulties as to come up with a good design for it. I will do it in Java. Here's what's needed:

What you need to know about BP debates: There are four teams of 2 debaters each and a judge. The four groups are assigned a specific position: gov1, gov2, op1, op2. There is no significance to the order within a team.

The goal of the application is to get as input the debaters who are present (for example, if there are 20 people, we will hold 2 debates) and assign them to teams and roles with regards to the history of each debater so that:

• Each debater should debate with (be on the same team) as many people as possible.
• Each debater should uniformly debate in different positions.
• The debate should be fair - debaters have different levels of experience and this should be as even as possible - i.e., there shouldn't be a team of two very experienced debaters and a team of junior debaters.
• There should be an option for the user to restrict the assignment in various ways, such as:
  • Specifying that two people should debate together, in a specific position or not.
  • Specifying that a single debater should be in a specific position, regardless of the partner.
  • etc...

If anyone can try to give me some pointers for a design for this application, I'll be so thankful! Also, I've never implemented a GUI before, so I'd appreciate some pointers on that as well, but it's not the major issue right now.