Why are these events?

[Name]

ping pong parachute, end of story

Well at least it doesn't take much time to make a device for it...

Fermi Questions is definitely worse, since you have to waste your time memorizing a ton of random numbers that have no practical application

What are you talking about, thanks to Fermi at MIT I know how many calories are in a cubic light year of butter! I'm going to use that knowledge everyday of my life!

I'd say most events have very little practical application. I doubt knowing how to differentiate different amphibians and reptiles has any practical applications. Or breaking codes (especially when you can just use a computer to do it). Or building a bottle rocket.

Also the time spent perfecting a rocket though repeated trials and adjustments would make it a time sink as well. I doubt a quickly constructed rocket would do well.

And I can't even start to explain how knowing the number of calories in a cubic light year has changed my life!

[UTF-8 U+6211 U+662F]

Well at least it doesn't take much time to make a device for it...

Fermi Questions is definitely worse, since you have to waste your time memorizing a ton of random numbers that have no practical application

What are you talking about, thanks to Fermi at MIT I know how many calories are in a cubic light year of butter! I'm going to use that knowledge everyday of my life!

I'd say most events have very little practical application. I doubt knowing how to differentiate different amphibians and reptiles has any practical applications. Or breaking codes (especially when you can just use a computer to do it). Or building a bottle rocket.

Also the time spent perfecting a rocket though repeated trials and adjustments would make it a time sink as well. I doubt a quickly constructed rocket would do well.

And I can't even start to explain how knowing the number of calories in a cubic light year has changed my life!

Hey, estimation is important!

[Selundar]

I competed in RFTS last time it was in rotation and can testify that stellar evolution and other astrophysics topics usually made up around 75% of each test. Simply identifying constellations wasn’t actually all that common. Usually for identifying the stars and DSOs, you also needed information about their stage of stellar evolution or the wavelengths images were taken in and their importance. The rules outlining the theoretical portion are very short, but this just makes the topics that can be tested on very broad.

As far as math goes, I want to remind people that RFTS does not allow competitors to use calculators and there really is almost no math involved. The most you’ll see is knowing that if you are twice as far from a star, you’ll receive 1/4th the brightness or a very simple Kepler’s Third Law problem with simple numbers.

Btw this is one of the best div B events so I hope they never get rid of it.

[jaspattack]

And we're all just going to ignore the fact that Pentathlon was run on the national level?

[SciolyMaster]

And we're all just going to ignore the fact that Pentathlon was run on the national level?

The key word here is "was"...

[Bread]

I'm surprised no one has brought up WiDi yet.

[dxu46]

When you mention bad events, you don't just leave out WIDI, Game On, Mystery Architecture, Fast Facts, Picture This, etc. Just saying...

[TheCrazyChemist]

When you mention bad events, you don't just leave out WIDI, Game On, Mystery Architecture, Fast Facts, Picture This, etc. Just saying...

Oh yes, game on. Fast Facts was fun tho.

[Name]

When you mention bad events, you don't just leave out WIDI, Game On, Mystery Architecture, Fast Facts, Picture This, etc. Just saying...

So basically inquiry events=bad.

[CookiePie1]

But inquiry events can practice scientific skills and practices. WIDI - while it seems uselsss, communication is key in any scientific experiment, especially if you want them to be able ot recreate it without you watching over their shoulder. Game on practices CS skills. You might not be really coding, but you're still learning about the structure of a program/game, and later, you can go on to make games with actual code. You can make these kinds of connections to almost all "useless" events.