All you need to know about this weekend's TECT National Sevens in Tauranga

Senior tutor at Tauranga's Toi Ohomai campus Jeffrey Kranenburg with the app. Photo / George Novak

Toi Ohomai students are adding to the TECT National Sevens tournament experience by developing an app for fans to follow their favourite teams and keep track of results over the two days.

The TECT National Sevens, which has been held in the Bay of Plenty region six times, will be hosted in Tauranga for the first time this weekend since its inception in 1975.

With a total of 28 teams from around the country playing 78 games, including pool games on Saturday before finals games on Sunday, a group of students from Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology's Rotorua and Tauranga campuses have worked closely with Bay of Plenty Rugby to develop the app to make following the tournament easier.

The app is available at nationalsevensapp.nz and can be saved to a homescreen. It has been developed as a progressive web app (PWA), which is a new technology used to load websites fast on mobile devices and can show content even without an internet connection.

Over 16 weeks the students, including Level 7 project students from the Rotorua campus Corban Hirawani, Peter Bowman and Kimberley Mackay and Level 5 student Jackson Currie from the Tauranga campus, supervised and mentored by senior tutor Jeffrey Kranenburg, came up with the digital technology to allow people to see the draws, keep track of the scores, pool games, elimination rounds during the tournament as well as information about the teams, sponsors and past winners.

Kranenburg said the students' semester ended on November 22 and were told at the start of the project they would need to be committed well beyond that date. "They really looked at what the industry uses and what they wanted to do and then they used that to build their project," Kranenburg said.

With thousands of people expected at the tournament, Kranenburg said they were expecting about 5000 users.

Bowman will be updating the app live during the tournament.

The first game on Saturday is scheduled for 10.05am. According to the MetService 10-day forecast light winds and a few showers are expected in Tauranga on Saturday and Sunday.

TECT National Sevens by the numbers:

2774 meals (teams, volunteers, referees)
56 minivans
50 SKY crew
30 market holders
30 volunteers
16 hours of live SKY coverage
16 Tauranga motels/hotels being used
10 food vendors
6 times hosted in Bay of Plenty
1 time hosted in Tauranga
1 water slide

What you can take into the venue:

Non-commercial food (e.g sandwiches, fruit, crackers & cakes)
Empty plastic water bottles up to 1.5 litres. Water can be provided by the venue
Camping/beach collapsible chairs
Picnic blankets
Shade/rain umbrellas (only in restricted areas)
Chilly bins
Supporter banners and flags

What you can't take into the venue:

Alcohol not purchased at the venue
Opened drink containers
Drinking containers larger than 1.5 litres
Cans, glass or bottles
Illicit drugs
Commercially produced takeaway food such as McDonalds, KFC, Subway etc.
Signs or banners that are obscene, offensive or abusive
Sound amplifiers such as air horns or loud hailers
Animals (with exception of seeing-eye dogs)
Large furniture including shade tents, blow-up chairs
Weapons, fireworks missiles or other items considered dangerous goods
Gang patches
Commercial cameras