Question about calculating score averages over time

[llaffer]

I'm thinking about developing an iOS app that will let someone record their team's scores and keep track of their averages and calculate handicaps as it goes. My question is about the time a score should continue to be used in the score calculations, if there is such a thing.

Example: Let's say that one of my kids bowled an average of 60 over 10 games. But over that time, he has been improving, so the average of the next 10 games would be 100. Taking in the total of the 20 scores, the average would be 80, lowered from those early games.

Is there a general time limit that you'd keep scores around, or limit the number of games to the "n" most recent games to calculate the average, since in my above example, the chances of scoring 100 is more likely than going back to 80, so I would think we would want that average to show that.

I'm thinking about having these things configurable to the end user anyway in both number of games and time duration options, but I just wanted to see what, if there is one, "normal" is for something like this so I can set some defaults.

Let me know if I'm still unclear.

Thanks.

[Mike White]

The standard time frame for an average is season by season, league by league.

Some tournaments use a something similar to a rolling average (i.e. last 30 games) but leagues use start to finish.

So your app would need to keep total pins, and number of games for each person, and in what league they are bowled.

Each new league starts with 0 games bowled.

[UBowling]

If you are developing a scoring app you will want to add a lot of options for the reporting. When entering the score you will want to have them enter the event name (league or tournament or practice), the bowling center, the date, and probably the bowling ball used. That way they can sort the statistics by all of those metrics. They could report on which ball they score the best with, which lanes they bowl the best on in each center, which pattern they score the highest on, etc.

I use the Bowl Sheet 2 app and I track all of that data and more.