Food Science B

[Sasstiel]

Looking over the rules, Rule 3a says "Part 1: This part of the test will include both experimental tasks and multiple choice or other questions about the chemistry of food AND food grains (any seed)." This would seem to say that while the event focus may be on grains this year, that the entire world of food chemistry is not off limits and that anything within the rough definition of the chemistry of foods is fair game. If they had wanted it to be just about grains, I'd think they would have used different wording... any thoughts?

I agree with you, but I would think that it's just grains.

[Sasstiel]

Please can some one say what is needed to be prepared regarding food grains?

In the rules, it has everything that you would need. Just look it up and use that.

[Skink]

I had the opportunity to supervise this at a competitive invitational and was not thrilled with what I saw. I had teams spending upwards of 15min fumbling around with the calorimetry lab (can't light the match, can't keep it from burning itself out, can't light the food, can't burn the food completely, can't burn the food adequately...) that's, still, only worth 15% of the score. It's not worth it! If you take the test very well, you're bound to win most levels of competition with or without the lab. I worry about how much practice time gets devoted to this activity.

[NeilMehta]

I had the opportunity to supervise this at a competitive invitational and was not thrilled with what I saw. I had teams spending upwards of 15min fumbling around with the calorimetry lab (can't light the match, can't keep it from burning itself out, can't light the food, can't burn the food completely, can't burn the food adequately...) that's, still, only worth 15% of the score. It's not worth it! If you take the test very well, you're bound to win most levels of competition with or without the lab. I worry about how much practice time gets devoted to this activity.

It's interesting how they choose to place such a high weight on the test this year, because we don't need a notebook this year either. Is there a lab portion of Potions and Poisons, cause I heard it was replacing Food Science next year.

[Sasstiel]

In the last meet I attended, there was no "lab work" with Benedict', Biurets, etc. Any ideas why?

[SPP SciO]

I had the opportunity to supervise this at a competitive invitational and was not thrilled with what I saw. I had teams spending upwards of 15min fumbling around with the calorimetry lab (can't light the match, can't keep it from burning itself out, can't light the food, can't burn the food completely, can't burn the food adequately...) that's, still, only worth 15% of the score. It's not worth it! If you take the test very well, you're bound to win most levels of competition with or without the lab. I worry about how much practice time gets devoted to this activity.

Does the 15% of the score derive completely from the final determination of the calories in the food item, or are there a bunch of points divided up and awarded for things like setting up equations, unit conversions, error analysis, etc?

I think the calorimetry math, and being able to estimate energy losses, is all good stuff and worth studying and preparing for. Has this been taken into account when scoring the tests at the various invitationals that have happened so far?

[Skink]

Neil,
Yeah, it's straightforward mix-these-chemicals sorts of deals. It'll be a breath of fresh air from the last four years of B chemistry event messes.

Sasstiel,
The only required activity is the calorimetry. After that, it's at the discretion of the supervisor to design the event.

SPP SciO,
The rules are open-ended. I would hope that folks have sensitivity to the fact that this is a multistep activity, but I'm sure it'll be different every time. When I did it, I credited teams for bringing a device at all, collecting data sensibly (oh, man...this was a mess), equations and supporting calculations, finally followed by hitting the "literature" value for my foodstuff within certain percentage intervals all within the 15%. I asked about weaknesses in the procedure in the other section of the test. I look forward to getting others' tests back to see how they approach this.

[Sasstiel]

Anyone have any idea why they decided to use joules/grams for the calorimeter part, and can you send me the equation?

[Em]

I had the opportunity to supervise this at a competitive invitational and was not thrilled with what I saw. I had teams spending upwards of 15min fumbling around with the calorimetry lab (can't light the match, can't keep it from burning itself out, can't light the food, can't burn the food completely, can't burn the food adequately...) that's, still, only worth 15% of the score. It's not worth it! If you take the test very well, you're bound to win most levels of competition with or without the lab. I worry about how much practice time gets devoted to this activity.

Does the 15% of the score derive completely from the final determination of the calories in the food item, or are there a bunch of points divided up and awarded for things like setting up equations, unit conversions, error analysis, etc?

I think the calorimetry math, and being able to estimate energy losses, is all good stuff and worth studying and preparing for. Has this been taken into account when scoring the tests at the various invitationals that have happened so far?

At an invitational my students attended one team received all the experimental points for (1) setting up the calorimetry equation using their experimental data and (2) calculating the density of a muffin. The team didn't have time to solve the calculation for #1, but seemingly knowing what needed to be done received full credit, even without a "correct" answer. However, as noted by someone previously, my second team scored more points by doing well on their exam even though they received 0/20 points on the experiment portion.

[Sasstiel]

I had the opportunity to supervise this at a competitive invitational and was not thrilled with what I saw. I had teams spending upwards of 15min fumbling around with the calorimetry lab (can't light the match, can't keep it from burning itself out, can't light the food, can't burn the food completely, can't burn the food adequately...) that's, still, only worth 15% of the score. It's not worth it! If you take the test very well, you're bound to win most levels of competition with or without the lab. I worry about how much practice time gets devoted to this activity.

Does the 15% of the score derive completely from the final determination of the calories in the food item, or are there a bunch of points divided up and awarded for things like setting up equations, unit conversions, error analysis, etc?

I think the calorimetry math, and being able to estimate energy losses, is all good stuff and worth studying and preparing for. Has this been taken into account when scoring the tests at the various invitationals that have happened so far?

At an invitational my students attended one team received all the experimental points for (1) setting up the calorimetry equation using their experimental data and (2) calculating the density of a muffin. The team didn't have time to solve the calculation for #1, but seemingly knowing what needed to be done received full credit, even without a "correct" answer. However, as noted by someone previously, my second team scored more points by doing well on their exam even though they received 0/20 points on the experiment portion.

On the test that I took, calculating the density was a question, where they gave you the measurements and asked you to solve. Also, even though we weren't accurate at all for the calorimeter portion, we still got first place overall.