Compute This B

[ichaelm]

lol me neither but i got a bad report from the people who did, and i was worried :S Does anyone know what it was like specifically?

[fmtiger124]

That's true for any event. At state this year (Compute This) I was expecting something really obscure, but most of the information I found on my first search. Hope for something easy, but prepare for something hard.

I find that usually most of them are easy to find and there's usually one question that takes a while to find....of course the graph ends up taking up most of your time in the first place so I usually skipped a question for later if I couldn't find it fairly quickly and would come back to it

[zyzzyva980]

Details, people, details! What was on the PA test? What have you heard?

[AlphaTauri]

I took the test, and it asked you to find the "average yearly area of the sun covered by sunspots for each year from 1995-2009 and create a graph" or something like that. The short answer questions had to do with: definition of "planet", the ISS, why the Sun will become a red giant, exoplanets/Kepler Space Telescope, and something about a supernova. The answers to the short answer questions were relatively easy to find, but the actual sunspot data was really hard to find. My partner and I found it with about five minutes left on the clock (after answering all 5 short answer), and it seems that even the first place team (SHMS) didn't find it until about halfway through the event.

Now, complaints about the event itself: everyone showed up at about 12:00 but the actual event didn't start until 12:25. Since they have to give you the alloted 50 minutes, this means that many people (including me) were late to their next event or had to leave in the middle of Compute This. I've also heard that many teams had problems saving their files to the network, which probably resulted in further delays.

Question: If you find an online calculator, are you allowed to use it? The rules say "no calculators" but they also say that teams can access any "publicly accessible www site or search engine".

[gyourkoshaven]

There is no need for a calculator, because Excel provides you with all of the math you need for a set of data (Sum, mean) within the program.

[blue cobra]

Question: If you find an online calculator, are you allowed to use it? The rules say "no calculators" but they also say that teams can access any "publicly accessible www site or search engine".

I would think so. I used one at States for adding time, and I don't think they would make that a rule since it would be so hard to enforce.

[FueL]

Did anyone get the last half of question #5 at NY states division B? They were asking how much body mass Cernan lost while he was on the spacewalk. We couldn't find it anywhere while we were searching.

The test otherwise seemed fairly easy to us, but we ended up finding the data for the Excel table too quickly. Though we finished the graph portion in ~15 minutes, I have a feeling some of the data we entered was incorrect because we were going through each of the Gemini missions so quickly. Overall, neither of us were concentrating very much. Lesson learned. >_<

[zyzzyva980]

Question: If you find an online calculator, are you allowed to use it? The rules say "no calculators" but they also say that teams can access any "publicly accessible www site or search engine".

I wouldn't risk it. Like gyourkoshaven said, Excel will give you anything you want to know.

[jgan96]

Did anyone get the last half of question #5 at NY states division B? They were asking how much body mass Cernan lost while he was on the spacewalk. We couldn't find it anywhere while we were searching.

The test otherwise seemed fairly easy to us, but we ended up finding the data for the Excel table too quickly. Though we finished the graph portion in ~15 minutes, I have a feeling some of the data we entered was incorrect because we were going through each of the Gemini missions so quickly. Overall, neither of us were concentrating very much. Lesson learned. >_<

I was there. We got 3rd! HA!

I didnt get to the 5th. Only up to the 4th... actually our group actually didn't ever practice. We just are that good at computers; we went there and did pretty much learned everything right there. I think that the questions weren't specific enough. How do we know whether they mean back-up crew or real crew?