The competition: participant may designate a Timer

SPP SciO
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Re: The competition: participant may designate a Timer

Post by SPP SciO »

Question for anyone that’s judged Mission this year - What’s the best practice for timing?

I like the “three timers, middle time counts” method, but this year we have to measure total run time, and timer time. Are people using the lap function on a stopwatch, using multiple stop watches, or having different judges measure the different durations? It seems like there’s a lot of room for human error when awarding these points.
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Re: The competition: participant may designate a Timer

Post by Unome »

SPP SciO wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:47 am Question for anyone that’s judged Mission this year - What’s the best practice for timing?

I like the “three timers, middle time counts” method, but this year we have to measure total run time, and timer time. Are people using the lap function on a stopwatch, using multiple stop watches, or having different judges measure the different durations? It seems like there’s a lot of room for human error when awarding these points.
The single time I ran this event, last year, (without much staff) I measured the timer time, since I wasn't really going to be doing much observing while the timer was running. If I had had more people I probably would have had a dedicated set of two timers for each. Not sure how applicable that is to this year though, I only skimmed the rules once at the beginning of the season.
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Re: The competition: participant may designate a Timer

Post by knightmoves »

SPP SciO wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:47 am Question for anyone that’s judged Mission this year - What’s the best practice for timing?

I like the “three timers, middle time counts” method, but this year we have to measure total run time, and timer time. Are people using the lap function on a stopwatch, using multiple stop watches, or having different judges measure the different durations? It seems like there’s a lot of room for human error when awarding these points.
I'm going to recommend not having a stopwatch in each hand for different functions, as you're basically guaranteed to make a mistake.

Stopwatch or phone with multiple lap timers works (start at the beginning, hit lap when the timer starts, hit lap when the timer stops, hit lap at the end, do math for the timer duration) and means you only have one button to push, so you can't make a mistake and push the wrong one.

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