Scioly.org Monthly Event Challenges: February 2021

[RasmitDevkota]

We are announcing Scioly.org's seventh Scioly.org Monthly Event Challenges, running from Saturday, February 27th to Saturday, March 6th, opening and closing at the same time: 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT.

We will be running three events: Digital Structures, Quantum Quandaries, and Water Quality! You will need to register in advance in order to participate.

• Digital Structures will follow the trial event rules here with a twist! You will need a paid SkyCiv license to participate. In order not to interfere with your participation in tournaments, you will be required not to turn on Competition Mode. You will start the event with a Scilympiad test where you will receive parameters and submit some predictions, you will design and test your structure in SkyCiv, and you will make your submission by 1) sharing your SkyCiv file and 2) uploading a screenshot via a Google Form.
• Quantum Quandaries will use the modified trial event rules here.
• Water Quality will follow the rules in the official 2021 Rules Manual.

The SMEC Scilympiad page can be found here.

Timeline: All times on days will be 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT.

• February 21 - Registration opens! Registration is through Google Forms, and you will login through Scilympiad later (instructions will be provided)
• February 24 - Registration for SMEC closes. We will not be accepting late registrations for Scilympiad.
• February 25/26 - Emails will be sent out containing instructions for Scilympiad logins.
• February 27 - Event starts!
• March 6 - Event ends!

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Registration has started!
Link: https://forms.gle/3ERKHRW89jYdo8oV8
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SMEC FAQs

• May students in college compete?
  Yes. Students must be 13 years of age or older, and must be in middle school, high school or college. Post-collegiate students MAY compete. Only participants located in the United States may register for this event.

• Will there be prizes?
  As of the date of this posting, there will not be any prizes for this month's Scioly.org Monthly Event Challenges.

• What do I do if I have trouble accessing the Scilympiad system, before or during my test?
  Contact sciolyperson1 via message on the Forums or by email. If you have questions about the event as a whole, contact bernard on Forums or by email.

• What events will be held in future SMECs?
  Future SMECs will include an event rotation consisting of present and past events. Stay tuned to find out!

If you want to volunteer to write any event, feel free to reach out!

• Do I have to participate in Science Olympiad at my own school/homeschool in order to participate in this event?
  No! The only requirement is a Scioly.org account.

Disclaimer: By signing up, you are confirming that you are of 13 years of age or older. We reserve the right to remove underage participants from the event. Moreover, by signing up, your personal information such as your Username, School, and state may be shared with members beyond the Scioly.org staff team for the purposes of scoring and running the event. Your username, school, state, and grade may also be shared to the public for results. We reserve the right to disqualify any participant due to suspicion of ineligibility including, but not limited to age restrictions or suspicion of academic dishonesty. Data submitted through Scilympiad will be stored through Scilympiad. Only participants located in the United States may register for this event.

[stenopushispidus]

I'm steno and I'm writing the SMEC February water quality test. I don't like secrets in tests because they can give an unfair advantage so I wanted to make sure everyone knows this:

This test is a 105 question, 210 point test.
The two questions worth the most are #45 and #92.
In my opinion, the most creative/fun question is #22.
There are 22 free response questions, 22 multiple choice, 3 true-or-false, 55 fill-in-the-blank.

This information can also be found on the test introduction on scilympiad.

[bernard]

Clarification for Digital Structures: All structures will be evaluated using the Contact Depth Line specification for Division B. If you normally compete in Division C, this means you can have up to 5.0 cm of more depth!

[stenopushispidus]

Water Quality Event Supervisor Review

First of all, thanks to JC for letting me help with SMEC, this was my first time as an event supervisor/writer/grader. Thanks also to SilverBreeze who gave me some tips/criticisms on the test after taking it.

I've been doing water quality for two years and am semi-good at the event (4th place at BEARSO, 7th place at UT (solo), etc). I really enjoy this event because of how it covers so many important parts of water and marine ecology: biogeochemical/nutrient cycles, wastewater treatment, organisms, ecology, water chemistry, estuaries, WQI, algal blooms, etc. If you couldn't tell from my username, I really enjoy marine organisms and this event first "exposed" me to them so I'm very passionate about this event. I think that water quality tests can get very diverse and comprehensive with the rules allowing tests to cover a wide breadth of subjects, and that's why I enjoy writing tests for it so much.

Test Review

In hindsight, I probably should have put less do-you-have-the-info-on-your-cheatsheet questions and more analysis questions. I tried to cover as many facets included in the Water Quality rules as possible. I was surprised for some of the questions because I thought many people would get them wrong, but more than half got them right. All in all, I completely underestimated the power of scioly.org users and will not make the same mistake again.

Side Notes:
- I had one question asking for three ways to increase capillary action and the answers were so diverse and varied, I will never write a question like that again. My bad, sorry.
- Some questions had a large amount of points compared to others of the same difficulty and this is why: I split up the points into thirds for each of the three sections of the test as specified in the national rules, so if the questions were in different sections it's because there were probably less questions in the section with the question worth more points. Sorry.

Difficult Questions

#47: One of the questions that many people got wrong this question, the identification of the first organism. This was a drawing of a type of gorgonia, but many teams put hard coral which is very close.

#26-39: This question was filling out values in a life table. No one got every one right and if I remember correctly, no team got more than half correct either. The equations I used to calculate my answers were:
1. lx=nx/n0
2. dx=nx–nx+1
3. lxmx=lx•mx
4. qx=dx/nx

#70: Only one or two teams got full points for this question. I was looking for paralyzation from saliva, use of muscular foot to trap prey, and radula used to slice up the prey to be consumed.

#93: The common symptom between the 7 most common waterborne diseases in the world is diarrhea. Just random info.

#105: This question was about stochastic effects, which I don't think many people knew about because it is vague information. Stochastic effects are about radiation and the answers were cancer and genetic effects. I hoped that my hint ("ALARA") would shine some light onto the meaning of the question (ALARA is an acronym meaning As Little As Reasonably Achievable and describes how radiation should be used in terms of exposure).

[*]Any other questions you'd like explained? Please respond to this post here and I'll try my best to answer you.[*]

issues with grading can be entered here: https://forms.gle/X75FETJzes9RT1739
test review form in case you missed it or something: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link


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