For decades, the procedure for scoring candidates during a PADI Instructor Development Course (IDC) has looked much the same. The evaluator descends with an underwater prompt card, a pencil and a large slate, and records scores by hand while managing buoyancy. Pencils get lost or break underwater. The slate is bulky and slow to work with.
This is the story of a dive instructor who decided to leave that kit behind. Using an AI coding tool and the full-touchscreen design of DIVEVOLK underwater phone housings, they built a digital scoring web app and now run instructor evaluations on a phone, underwater.
The Pain Point of Traditional Underwater Evaluation
During practice teaching and instructor examinations, the score sheet is not a formality—it is a core record of the course. The instructor behind this tool put the problem plainly:
"I built this underwater scoring tool because during instructor courses we need to grade candidates, and that scoring is an important record of the whole course. In the past, PADI instructor trainers took an underwater prompt card, a pencil and a big board into the water. The pencil is easily lost or damaged underwater, and the board is large and cumbersome to work with."
A rigid board adds drag and occupies a hand. A pencil is a consumable that fails at the worst moment. Neither problem is dramatic on its own; together they make an important record harder to capture cleanly than it needs to be.
Building a Digital Solution with AI
The idea of a digital score sheet is not new—the barrier has always been building one. That barrier is what changed.
"A few years ago I simply would not have had the energy to build a small tool like this on my own. It is not that I did not want to—working out the logic, writing the code and fixing the bugs would have eaten an enormous amount of spare time, and it would most likely have fizzled out."
Instead, they used Cursor, an AI coding tool. They described the requirements, added screenshots of the PADI scoring sheet, and after a few rounds of back and forth the tool understood the intent and produced a working version—faster than expected.
Offline in the Browser, Operated Through the Screen
An app that only works on land is useless below the surface. There is no cellular or Wi-Fi signal underwater, so the tool had to run without a connection.
"It is a web app, so any phone's browser can open it, and it works offline—open it on land beforehand and it runs underwater with no connection. With a DIVEVOLK underwater phone housing to take the phone down, scoring underwater is easy."
The workflow is simple: open the page in the phone's browser on the boat or the shore, seal the phone into the housing, and get in the water. No app store download, no account, no signal.
This is where the SeaTouch 4 Max matters. Its gel membrane passes your finger through to the phone's own touchscreen, so the housing is button-free by design. A shutter button—physical or Bluetooth—can fire a camera, but it cannot scroll a web page or tick a checkbox in a form. Full touchscreen access is what makes a browser-based tool usable at depth at all.
Real-World Adoption
The tool did not stay a personal experiment. The instructor passed it to Course Director Linda at their shop, who now uses it during evaluations too.
"I also recommended the tool to Linda, the course director at our shop. Now when candidates do their practice teaching, we are underwater tapping away on a phone—from shore it looks like we are playing with our phones, but we are actually keeping a proper scoring record. Afterwards I can save the result straight to PDF for the student."
That PDF is the part instructor candidates notice. Instead of waiting for someone to decipher wet handwriting and retype it, they get a clean, legible record of their evaluation—and a clear picture of how the session actually went. For instructors already teaching with a touchscreen housing, it is a small change with an outsized effect on record-keeping.
The Same Idea Applied: An SF2 CCR Checklist
Once an interactive page could be used underwater, the same approach was applied to another data-heavy procedure. Pre-dive checks on a closed-circuit rebreather such as the SF2 are extensive, and parts of them involve arithmetic—checking that oxygen sensor voltages fall in the expected range and track the relationship you expect.
"Using the same approach I also built an SF2 CCR checklist. The pre-dive checks for CCR are very important, and we only ever had them on paper or as a PDF. But the checks often involve calculations—whether the sensor voltage range matches what you expect, whether it is roughly linear—and if software handles those calculations automatically, it removes some opportunities for human error."
The point is not that software replaces judgement. It is that arithmetic done by hand, in a hurry, before a dive is a place where mistakes can creep in—and it is exactly the kind of step a checklist app can take off your plate. The instructor has made that checklist publicly available; like the scoring sheet, it opens in a phone browser.
The Wider Point
Most of us treat a phone underwater as a camera. It is also a computer, and dive professionals have plenty of problems that a small piece of software could solve. The instructor's own summary:
"Phones are extremely capable now, but we are so used to them in daily life that using one for a task no longer feels remarkable. Combine a phone with diving, though—bring it into the dive with something like a DIVEVOLK housing—and interesting ideas tend to appear."
Scoring sheets and pre-dive checklists are only the obvious cases. We are glad to see our SeaTouch 4 Max Kits used for professional work as well as photography.
Are you a dive professional building your own digital tools for training? We would like to hear about it—get in touch through our contact page.
