Ohio 2013

[Skink]

So my friend and I are at wright state right now, and we conducted a little experiment...
It turns out that the score board that displays how many events remain to be scored is a huge hoax!
It's just a loop that automatically counts one down every 140 seconds. And people cheer like fools every time it counts down

I'm infinitely curious. What, exactly, did this look like?

http://i.imgur.com/1pUsB.jpg

Nice. I might have to steal that concept for either an upcoming invitational or Regional.

Re: poorly ran events, it's easy to criticize others until you've done it a few times yourself. Often times, supervisors are at fault, sure, but, sometimes, goofy rotations are a byproduct of the room they were given. That said, I agree that Thermodynamics can be a mess (seems this tournament was just another example). The only time I had a good experience with that event was when a reliable school (one that's been to Nationals regularly until recently) supervised it.

[Mr Sarcastic]

On the subject of stations one of my friends complained about how Rocks and Minerals was run. There were 10 stations that was not put in any order, so whenever a station opened you ran to that station hoping to get it before another team. She also complained that at the end one team just sat at a station that a couple teams needed to do.

Wow that sounds like it was terrible. It seems that it might be the people who supervised the events' fault for not explaining better, though, because Anatomy was a station event, but it was run very smoothly, even with about 20 stations.
Maybe station events are just very hard to run.

[computergeek3]

On the subject of stations one of my friends complained about how Rocks and Minerals was run. There were 10 stations that was not put in any order, so whenever a station opened you ran to that station hoping to get it before another team. She also complained that at the end one team just sat at a station that a couple teams needed to do.

Wow that sounds like it was terrible. It seems that it might be the people who supervised the events' fault for not explaining better, though, because Anatomy was a station event, but it was run very smoothly, even with about 20 stations.
Maybe station events are just very hard to run.

Station events are typically well-run, just some people have no idea how to run them...I wasn't at Wright State, but I have seen the thing with Rocks occur with Forestry....

[chalker]

So my friend and I are at wright state right now, and we conducted a little experiment...
It turns out that the score board that displays how many events remain to be scored is a huge hoax!
It's just a loop that automatically counts one down every 140 seconds. And people cheer like fools every time it counts down

I'm infinitely curious. What, exactly, did this look like?

http://i.imgur.com/1pUsB.jpg

A static picture totally doesn't do it justice I think.. unfortunately I don't have a video of the board in action and the source file is 1GB. In addition to 'counting down', there are all kinds of other things the text does, like fly around the screen for a bit, change color, blink,spin around, etc. etc. Meanwhile the top and bottom rings have logos spinning around them.

[chalker]

On the subject of stations one of my friends complained about how Rocks and Minerals was run. There were 10 stations that was not put in any order, so whenever a station opened you ran to that station hoping to get it before another team. She also complained that at the end one team just sat at a station that a couple teams needed to do.

We heard multiple complaints about R&M, and while I didn't get a chance to speak directly to the event supervisor, I did speak to the coach of the team that was responsible for the event and he apologized profusely. If this would have been a regional or state tournament I would have probably made it not count towards the team final score, however at an invitational I'm generally more lax about those types of things.

[A Person]

Just wondering, is there any where I can find the live stream that was on the website yesterday?

[chalker]

However, the lunch plan might have to be a bit different at Nationals. The 45 minute break just was not enough time, and luckily I didn't have any events at 12:30, or else I would have had to go hungry till after the competition was over. It was absolute chaos in the lunch area at that time.
Lunch was pretty interesting for me, though. I ended up waiting for a sub for about 30 minutes, then waiting in line to buy food for another 30 minutes. About halfway through waiting to buy my food, I realized that what I had in my pocket was not my wallet, but my calculator, so I had to borrow money from someone else .

I do have a question about the event at 7:00. Why did that one event have to start so early and why did all the teams compete at once?

We weren't happy about what happened with Lunch either (and will definitely address it at nationals). The company that runs the various food stations apparently didn't fully comprehend that when we told them there would be 2000+ people running around that would require additional staffing beyond the 'normal' weekend levels for them.

Regarding Disease Detectives, we historically have found it to be the most time consuming event to grade at Nationals. Since it's purely written format, it's easy to run all the teams first thing in the morning and give the event supervisors plenty of time to grade them. If we were to run it at the 8AM 'first' block, it would unfairly conflict for some teams and not others since the rest of the schedule is perfectly balanced (e.g. all events either run in 3 blocks or as a walk-in / sign up, meaning everyone has exactly the same event conflicts). As an aside, I didn't expect any initial scores to be turned in until about 12:15, since the 'morning' events ended at noon. I was completely caught off guard when the Disease Detective supervisors walked in the scoring room a little after 11 saying they had BOTH events completely done and ready to submit!

[chalker]

Just wondering, is there any where I can find the live stream that was on the website yesterday?

It'll be put up sometime this week, likely on Youtube. I'll post the link once it is.

[chalker]

Our team went to Wright State but left before the Awards, will they ship the results/medal/tests to us? And when?
Thanks so much for posting the pdf results too!!

I believe so. Your coach should know who to contact about that.

[Orange714]

We were only told "Monday" does that mean the coming Monday? The monday a week from now? Sorry for asking, but we're quite impatient to get them XD Thanks!