2021 Solon HS Invitational

[nicholasmaurer]

Hi everyone!

I am pleased to announce that the 27th annual Solon High School Science Olympiad Invitational will be held on January 23, 2021! Last year, our tournament hosted 72 teams representing eight states. We were also privileged to have six events run or authored by a National Event Supervisor, and an additional six events run or authored by alumni who placed in the top three nationally in their event. We always strive to offer a challenging but fair competition with experienced supervisors.

Other exciting features of our tournament include:

• Event and team awards through eighth place

• Tournament schedule which exactly mirrors that of the National Tournament

• Trial events, Scioly meetup, and special giveaways

• Affordable concessions and famous hospitality suite

We understand that the COVID-19 pandemic creates a substantial amount of uncertainty about our ability to host a tournament similar to years past. We also understand that registering and paying to attend tournaments in this context may pose a substantial financial risk. Our goal remains to conduct an in-person tournament. However, it will be many months before your teams or ours are in a position to assess whether doing so is safe this year. Therefore, we will be using the following adapted registration process:

• Our tournament registration will open online as normal in late August.

• All teams that register will be placed on a waiting list in the order of registration. The tournament fee will NOT be due at the time of registration.

• On or before November 1, we will make a preliminary decision in coordination with our school administration about the feasibility of holding on in-person tournament and the safe capacity of any such event. If an in-person tournament is not possible, or if the capacity would be severely limited such that many schools would be excluded from participating, we will instead pursue a virtual tournament using the national framework.

• Teams on the waiting list will then be offered slots at our tournament in the order of their registration. If your team chooses to finalize their registration at this time, our registration fee of $100/team will be due by December 15, 2020.

Additionally, we are modifying our cancellation policy. If COVID-19 circumstances change after November 1 resulting in cancellation or reduced capacity for our tournament, we will offer all impacted schools who have already paid a $100/team credit towards registration for our 2022 tournament. Similarly, if your local circumstances relating to COVID-19 change such that your school is no longer able to participate in our tournament, we will offer a $75/team credit towards registration for our 2022 tournament. Our cancellation policy for other causes (e.g. inclement weather) remains the same as in years past.

More information will continue to be updated on our website. Please let me know if you have any questions or are interested in attending in 2021!

[nicholasmaurer]

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to share that, as of today, 86 teams from 11 states have pre-registered for the 2021 SHSSO Invitational. I am also excited to announce that we have finalized our tournament format plan and are beginning to confirm registration for those teams who have pre-registered while continuing to accept new registrations. Here is our format announcement from today:

After careful consideration, it is apparent that we will not be able to host an in-person tournament as we have the past 26 years. While this is not the outcome we had hoped for, we nevertheless remain committed to offering your students a best-in-class competition experience.

Therefore, our intent is to plan for a Satellite SO tournament where teams virtually compete from their respective schools on Saturday 1/23/21. We intend to ship each team a standardized box of materials and supplies (e.g. forensics samples, WIDI components) to mimic a real tournament as closely as possible. We also intend to have a week-long device testing window for certain build events that starts on Saturday 1/16/21 and continues through the day of the tournament.

However, as local circumstances continue to fluctuate rapidly, we also intend to survey all registered teams the first week of January to assess your ability to gather at your school on 1/23/21 to compete using a Satellite SO model. Based on the results of this survey we will follow one of two approaches:

Option 1 — At least two thirds of teams can gather at their school and participate in a Satellite SO Model
In this scenario, we will move forward with a Satellite SO tournament as planned for all teams who are able to do so. Any teams who are in the minority and unable to gather at their building will instead participate in a separately ranked tournament using the Mini SO model and event list, with their students competing from home. The tests and event supervisors for overlapping events will be the same for both tournaments. However, as Mini SO teams will not be able to participate in all of the same events or in the same ways as Satellite SO teams, these two groups will be ranked as separate tournaments and compete for separate awards. We will be releasing raw scores from both tournaments to all teams, which should allow students to estimate their ranking had they participated in the other format.

Option 2 — Less than two thirds of teams can gather at their school and participate in a Satellite SO Model
In this scenario, we will transition all teams to a Mini SO model where all students compete from home. We will work closely with our Event Supervisors to ensure their events are designed for success under either model. We have also structured our event list (see link) to allow for an easy transition, if necessary.

We believe this approach offers us the best chance to offer all of our students the highest level of competition possible. We hope to see you all (virtually) at our tournament this year.

[Giantpants]

For what its worth, here is my spreadsheet that I made really quickly! (Template my sciolyperson1 of course!) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

And here is the livestream link... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMW5dyYCC7k

[RobertYL]

Event Supervisor Review

Hello everyone! I am the co-event supervisor for Astronomy with Tad Komacek. Firstly, I want to thank all of the 86 teams who took the Astronomy test yesterday and congratulate you all for making it through. This test was definitely a grueling one (unless you also took MIT the same weekend) and you all should be proud of yourselves. Fortunately, the event went without issue (and I was able to get some wonderful statistics/data for each question!). Since I only wrote Section B, along with one of the questions in Section C, I'll just be giving some cursory comments on each section as a whole and review the overall results.

Astronomy

Statistics:
Mean: 51.0 (25.5%)
Median: 45.8 (22.9%)
St. Dev.: 28.0
Max: 129.5 (64.8%)

Graphs:

Astronomy_C-Distributions.png

More in-depth statistics and graphs pertaining to sections and specific questions can be found at this link.

Thoughts:
Overall, I am happy with the results, which were able to differentiate many of the stronger teams. However, teams did clump up at around the 40 point range, so more intermediate level problems could have better separated those teams. I hope teams are able to learn from the test and better prepare for their regional and state (and even national) level competitions. This test was fairly long in the hopes that teams could skip around to first tackle sections they were more comfortable and knowledgeable in, and then work on the trickier questions.

• Section A (General Knowledge) had a good distribution, with teams scoring well for the first few questions.
• Section B (Deep-Sky Objects) went as expected, with teams scoring well for basic identification and recall questions. Teams struggled on question B1 on the new CANDELS survey, introduced in the rules for this season, where they were asked about correction methods and research goals of CANDELS. Question B7 also was a low scoring one as the image was tougher to identify and the questions that followed were double jeopardy ones, requiring the correct DSO to be identified first.
• Section C (Calculations) had a typical triangular shape, with a steep decline that was led by the top teams. I would say the questions could have had more variety, as some standard astronomy formulae were not tested, but teams were able to almost full score each of the four questions.

I want to thank my co-ES, Tad, for writing this test with me, along with the team of graders and volunteers (John LoGalbo, Dimitri Kourennyi, Elizabeth Kissner) that helped us get everything graded and checked out by 7:30. With this amazing team, Solon has definitely been the least stressful invite I've supervised so far.

Test Release:
The test and all other material will be publicly released in this folder two weeks after the awards ceremony, on Sunday, February 7th. At the time of this post, only the statistics document is available.

Test Feedback

If you have feedback for either test, feel free to leave it here with the test code: 2021Solon-AstronomyC-Star

[shadow19]

Tourney Review :):)

Orni : 5th
blah. Test was way too short, leading to a terrible score distru (scored 1.5 points higher than my sister, who placed 9th). Furthermore, the id was quite boring, with no eggs/nests/skeleton/feather id. I think its possible that the images were also ripped off all about birds/wikipedia/ some other noncreative common source? Maybe just salty since was worst orni placement to date >: |

Fossils : 4th
Absolutely great test The opalized fossil looked so pretty ahhhh. Also really enjoyed the guess the fossil based on the description section, very creative and fun!

Designer Genes : 6th
Nice 9th-grade bio test we got going here. Really upset since last years solon test was epic (camper written iirc?) No further comments.

Anat : 5th
Test was decent, although a bit too much diagramming and not enough physiology questions. Disappointed with the lack of machines in the muscular section yaw. Also felt a tad short? I think we completely finished the test with no issues.

Overall:
Carmel flippin' op bro

[EwwPhysics]

I guess I'll also do event reviews

Anatomy (59th): I was a filler so idk how the test was. All I know is it was very difficult for someone who doesn't do anatomy.

Designer Genes (12th): I was expecting two good designer genes tests this weekend, instead i got none :/ At least it was screenshots of questions in Computer Modern instead of the bad scilympiad font. 1/10

Disease Detectives (18th): idk, pretty standard test. it was so stressful because at the end my partner realized she had capitalized her answers at the beginning when the instructions said not to, so we thought that they wouldn't be going through and grading manually and spent the last 30 seconds frantically trying to change answers to lowercase. Luckily, when we got our test back it had been manually graded. 8/10

Fossils (17th): Really fun test! 10/10

Protein Modeling (9th): I did the jmol section. It was pretty good. A little short, but it required some critical thinking which was very nice The one thing is that because the jmol and test sections were split into separate tests in scilympiad I wasn't sure whether I could work on both or if my work would save if I went to work on the other part of the test. 8/10

Overall (11th): Awards ceremony started on time! Time blocks were annoying and nice at the same time if that makes sense. 9/10

[Mr.Epithelium]

Digital Structures (Division C)

digitalstructures_2021_c_solon_scores_public.png

[reninkidney]

When will full team results be released for the Solon Division B invitational?

[cards104171]

When will full team results be released for the Solon Division B invitational?

This is the link to awards for the B Division Invitational: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xvT5qhB_P ... e=youtu.be

[sciolyperson1]

Quick event review I guess:

Boomilever (2nd): The instructions were clear and the event was well run. Props to JonB for running a build event under challenging circumstances!

As for the other events, I've heard extremely poor reviews from others. The sounds of music test was 40 questions, multiple choice. With 95 teams the pigeonhole principle would like a word. As for the codebusters test, the frequency table was filled out for the timed question, and removed afterwards - yet the question wasn't removed or the event wasn't trialed.