Scioly.org Monthly Event Challenges: April 2021

[thegroundsloth]

We are announcing Scioly.org's eighth Scioly.org Monthly Event Challenges, running from Saturday, April 24th to Saturday, May 1st, opening and closing at the same time: 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT.

We will be running three events: Machines, Science of Cancer, and Future of Science! You will need to register in advance in order to participate.

• Future of Science will use Booknerd's rules here.
• Science of Cancer will use the trial event rules here.
• Machines 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.

• April 20 - Registration opens! Registration is through Google Forms, and you will login through Scilympiad later (instructions will be provided)
• April 23 - Registration for SMEC closes. We will not be accepting late registrations for Scilympiad.
• April 23 - Emails will be sent out containing instructions for Scilympiad logins.
• April 24 - Event starts!
• May 1 - Event ends!

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Registration has started!
Link: https://forms.gle/dH61friWDqUZmoeJA
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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.

[thegroundsloth]

Hi all, I'm so excited to be writing the science of cancer test for this months SMEC! I just wanted to clarify that It will be solo and open internet. As always if you have any questions or concerns dm/ping me on the scioly discord or pm me on the forums (I'm on both a lot more than I should be). Hope you enjoy the test:)

[Booknerd]

Hello everyone!! I'm really grateful to have had this opportunity to write for Future of Science this month. First of all, thank you to everyone who participated, it really means a lot to me. And a special shoutout to the amazing sciolyperson1 for working his butt off to run this whole thing. And of course we can't forget about the people who have made scilympiad and this event possible this year. Thank you everyone!

A quick run-down of FoS: an open-internet event that tested various topics that are futuristic and likely will become a larger part of our lives in the future. These questions were organized in stations by topic, with each topic ranging from about 3-6 questions. In total there were 17 stations and 71 questions for a total of 138.61 points. Rules can be found in sciolyperson1's post above.

Thoughts on the test: I was really happy to see that so many people attempted to answer all of the questions. Although given how close some people were to a perfect score on the test, I think this meant that the test needed some more challenging questions and/or more stations. One of my regrets is not properly reviewing the questions that I wrote. When grading, I realized that 5 of my questions were problematic and decided to drop 4 and make some changes to the scoring on another. Questions 39, 40, 51, and 52 were dropped because of misleading and confusing wording on the questions on my part (these were multiple choice, the questions that asked to look at the graph in the deforestation station and two of the questions on the SAE's levels of autonomous vehicles.) In question 48, I gave full credit for two different answer choices, as it was my mistake to use two terms that were so similar. I also threw in two freebie questions into the test. I just threw in a fun fact and then gave the answer of the question. They were both supposed to be only 0.01 points, but I mistyped one of them and so one was 0.10 points instead. I apologize for these mistakes on my part. If I were to have done this again, I think I would have put more care into deciding point distribution. Looking back, I did it mostly on a whim and didn't think too much about it. I also should have wrote a more detailed guide for grading short response questions, as when it came to deciding partial credit, I probably wasn't deciding point values as well as I probably should have. The questions themselves weren't the greatest either, a lot of them being shallow and not really requiring much deeper thinking.

Thoughts on the event: I think that the concept for the event itself was good, although the rules and test itself may not have been the best. I would definitely say that making this open-internet was a good decision, given how such a broad range of topics were covered. The topics themselves I think weren't too shabby, but I definitely could've included more. Alas, my 10 PM brain that was writing the rules struggled to think of other good topics to include When I was originally writing the event, I wanted to make it a good balance of not just quizzing, but a fair amount of learning as well, with the specific goal of exposing the test-taker to many different fields of science and a greater awareness of not only thinking about the happenings of science in the now, but the happenings of science in the future.wow that was quite a run-on sentence Given it was open-internet, I didn't expect people to study and research beforehand (btw, props to the people out there who did, ur absolute legends), so I tried my best to make a test that would help the test taker to learn something along the way.

Personal thoughts: this being my first time ever writing a test for an event, I think it went fairly well. It really made my day to see people say that they enjoyed taking my test as an amateur test writer with an event that had never been run before, I didn't expect it to go so well. I learned a lot from this experience and I hope that I can take my failures (which I hope I don't repeat again) and successes into the future with me.

Also, for those of you who took the test, I would greatly appreciate it if you could fill out this form: https://forms.gle/Sx55Gi71u8vHCBdc7
Thank you!