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Hello coaches, competitors,

Sierra Vista Science Olympiad will be hosting the Sierra Vista Invitational, formerly Jeffrey Trail Invitational and Kraemer Invitational. The invitational date is Saturday February 6th, 2021, open to all Division B teams around the country with priority registration given to teams from Southern California. The registration fee is set at $85 per team, but we do not want to deter teams from participating based on price. If you are at all concerned about pricing, please contact us and we can accommodate you. We do not have a limit to the number of participating teams for each school, or in total. We will be using the MiniSO format through the Scilympiad.com.

In order to encourage participation of teams from all different levels, we will be using a tiered competition in the vein of Illinois SO. Teams will have the choice between competing in the AA tier with high placing state and national level teams, as well as a local A tier where teams can compete against newer or more casual teams. Both tiers will take the same tests, but be ranked only in comparison with teams within their chosen tier. Medals/trophies will be given to the top 6 teams in the AA tier and the top 4 teams in the A tier, which may scale up with the number of teams participating in each tier. Coaches will choose which tier to compete in by filling out the Google Form on the scilympiad page linked below.

As with last year, our tests will be written by states or national medalists in that event, as well as professionals who have been involved with Science Olympiad; in other words, top-quality tests! Test writers will for the most part adhere to regional level rules, but are encouraged to include a few state/national level topics in order to reflect the wide variety of teams that we have competing. The event slate will be determined once Southern California releases its plans, and we will likely adhere as best as we can to their event schedule.

While these times are uncertain and much is changing daily within the realm of Science Olympiad, with our administrative team's 6+ years of invitational hosting involvement, we can guarantee a great experience. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at timothy@elnitiarta.net or Mr. Shaun Evola at shaunevola@iusd.org. We hope to "see" you all there!

Scilympiad link: https://scilympiad.com/ca-svso

Update: registration will likely begin through Scilympiad Tuesday, September 22nd for Southern California teams and Thursday, September 24th for all other teams. With regional dates announced for Southern California, we are planning to stick with the February 6th date for the invitational. I will update this thread if there are any changes made to registration plans.

Hi all,

We lost track of the days, so we will have to push back registration a week.

Priority registration for SoCal and past participants is now open! If your team participated last year's invitational, your coach should have received the priority code in an email. Regular registration opens on Thursday, October 1st.

Sorry for the late post, but general registration is now open! Please visit our website at https://scilympiad.com/ca-svso to register. If you are planning to register in the future, please still make sure to take the pre-registration survey linked on the home page of the Scilympiad website.

Hello all,

Thanks for all the tremendous support we have received from the community for this invitational! We currently have 43 teams registered from 19 different schools, including some from 5 states other than California! The original post has been updated with all of the current information for the tournament. We will continue to update everyone as more info is received from the state organization about how the season will look for Southern California.

Thanks,
Tim

Hello everyone! Been a while, just wanted to give a quick update. We have closed registration off at 91 teams! If any teams have registered on the Google Form but not the Scilympiad site, please email me at timothy@elnitiarta.net to receive the access code to register your team. If there are any teams who are still interested in competing, email me or Shaun at shaunevola@iusd.org and we can figure something out.

I've also updated the Scilympiad site with the events, which you can find under Tournaments -> Tournaments -> Events. We will be running the slate for Southern California, meaning that Game On will remain as a scored event, Codebusters will be replacing Ping-Pong Parachute, Digital Structures will be replacing Boomilever, and Mousetrap Vehicle and Mission Possible will be run by video submission.

Finally, the plan for the awards ceremony is to livestream on the next Saturday, February 13th, at 4 PM Pacific so it does not conflict with any other tournaments. We will be awarding top 6 medals to the AA (National) subdivision and top 4 medals to the A (Local) subdivision.

Thanks for the all the interest in our invitational!

- Tim

EDIT: Two things I forgot:
1) I will also probably be releasing the event supervisor list sometime at the end of the month.
2) We will be releasing our tests publicly on our website after the invitational to promote more equity in the resources available to teams.

Hey everyone, sorry for the technical issues with Crime Busters!

Final decision on time extensions (ignore anything said during the time block):
A 20 min time extension will be given to all teams. DO NOT START BEFORE 4 PM PST

We told teams whose answers weren't saving to Ctrl + P the page and email it to us; make sure you do that!

If you experienced delays much greater than 20 minutes (basically couldn't test almost the whole time), have your coach file an appeal IF we did not already tell you to email us your answers.

Hello everyone! I realized I had forgotten to update people on the forums about the tournament. We had a fairly smooth day, and overall the tournament was a great success! In total we had 107 teams registered from 14 different states, including over 15 teams who have been to nationals the past few years. Thanks to all the amazing proctors who wrote and supervised all of the tests. We hope everyone will join us for awards next Saturday st 4 PM PST! The link will be posted here sometime later this week. Thanks so much for all the support from the community for this tournament, we are so glad to play a part in getting students excited about STEM, and we are glad that we are able to reach more folks than ever before with this virtual format.

Hey everyone!

Sierra Vista Invitational awards are just around the corner so I wanted to put together a prediction contest.
https://forms.gle/8NNzHa1N4EroKX1j9
School Prediction rules: Submit once. Vote for one school at most once and no more. You will get 5 points for predicting a school on the dot, 3 points for 1 off, 2 points for 2 off, 1 point for 3 off, and none for more than 3 off.

Good Luck!