Harvard Undergraduate Science Olympiad (HUSO) 2020

[Ashernoel]

Hi Scioly.org!

I am excited to announce that HUSO will be hosting two invitationals this year!

• The Division C tournament will be on Saturday, February 1st, 2020.
• The Division B tournament will be on Sunday, February 2nd, 2020.

Registration for both will open on Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 12:00 p.m. EDT. Each school may register up to two teams, and the registration fee of $150 will be due two weeks after registration is confirmed.

Features of this year’s tournaments include:
• A revamped test revision process that hopes to create more linear score distributions and reward competitors for their preparation and problem-solving ability.
• Event supervisors will be Science Olympiad alumni enrolled at Harvard College, many of whom have earned national distinctions. Coaches will not be expected to run any event at either tournament.
• Organized events, tours, and fun activities for attending teams, such as professor talks, student organization meet-and-greets, Admissions Office information sessions, and more.

Beyond the standard features associated with alumni-organized invitationals, the HUSO tournaments will also debut a new Science Olympiad iOS app designed to provide competitors with everything they need on competition day:



More specifically, HUSO will provide individualized, algorithmically generated, chronologically ordered schedules with impound times and locations, self-scheduled events, standard competition events and locations, and competition-wide events; competition feedback forms; apple map integration to get directions to an event using a user’s current location; floor plans; arbitration forms; a way for competitors to be featured in the pre-Awards Ceremony slideshow; HUSO related links; and access to Harvard University’s police department phone number. HUSO will be updated with the actual team names, numbers, and 2020 event schedule closer to the tournament. With this app available, my hope is that nobody gets lost on tournament day; everyone should always know exactly where they need to be.

In addition to supporting HUSO, Science Olympiad apps will be created for future competitions upon request to me by their tournament directors. If would like me to add any features to the app, reach out to a particular tournament you may be attending, or have any thoughts about the app, feel free to message me!

Jason Lee (2021) and Sandra Moon (2022) will be directing this year’s two HUSO tournaments, respectively. If you have any questions, feel free to email HUSO at sciolyharvard@gmail.com. Tournament updates will be sent out via push notifications on the HUSO iOS app, changes to the website, and posts in this thread.

We look forward to seeing you in February!

[Ashernoel]

Registration is still open! So far, we're looking forward to welcoming nearly 100 teams across both divisions to campus, including multiple state champions!

Check out the website or ask your coach for more details.

[sciencerules1234]

Is there a public attending teams list, or will that be sent at a later date

[Ashernoel]

A list of attending teams can be found on the website or within the app.

[Ashernoel]

Congratulations to all Division C teams who attended!

Updated Top 10 Teams:
1. Acton-BoxBorough Regional A -- 58
2. Acton-BoxBorough Regional B -- 95
3. Brookwood A -- 109
4. Hillsborough A -- 157
5. Walton A -- 213
6. Winchester A -- 315
7. Belmont A -- 351
8. Brookwood B -- 428
9. Hillsborough B -- 437
10. Lexington A -- 444

Edit: Gravity Vehicle scores were originally reversed. We have since corrected the problem. Top 5 rankings are unaffected.

Full results:
https://www.ezratech.us/competition/har ... al/results

Published Tests and Answer Keys:
https://www.sciolyharvard.org/archive

Tournament Feedback Form:
https://forms.gle/z9r2eVPx14VWp9nX6

Today was our biggest tournament yet. We took risks with the app and test difficulty, and we hope teams enjoyed them. Throughout the day, competitors used the Event-Specific feedback form within the app to submit 361 responses to their events, and these are already proving useful in understanding how competitors experienced the invitational. We loved hosting Division C today, and we look forward to hosting Division B tomorrow!

Community members are free and encouraged to reach out to the event supervisors listed on the cover of exams if they run into questions while studying the content. If a supervisor is not listed, reach out to me or our organization's address sciolyharvard [at] gmail [dot] com.

,
HUSO

[poonicle]

I enjoyed the tournament at Harvard yesterday and thought that the experience was a step up from last year in a lot of ways! I particularly think that the decision to run Harvard at a state level was a good idea (and counting Forensics as a trial, just like MA states!), as it seemed that the vast majority of the teams were from Massachusetts save for one notable exception. However, I did hear of some events testing Nationals-only content... This was not an issue for me so I will not comment further on it.

Chemistry Lab was my favorite event by far at the competition. The lab safety session was clear, quick, and informative, and Harvard's Chemistry lab provided everything--including safety goggles, lab coats, beakers, and gloves--for the contestants. The test was long and difficult, but it had a good balance of easier questions and more difficult problems. I thought it was actually comparable to MIT's quality ;;___;;

Write It Do It, after MIT's fifty-item WIDI, seemed very tame. I wish there was more complexity in the WIDI with regards to differing materials (there were like 10-12 beads??? ok) and the complexity of materials interacting with each other. The majority of the items were set apart from each other, which was quite nice to write lol but idk if it's the best quality. This was the only event that I thought had decreased in quality from last year.

The Geologic Mapping test was very legit and had a lot of stuff that my partner and I had never seen before. I talked to the ES before the test and he's an earth science major (!!!) so I knew the test would be quite hard. I wish that the test had been longer--several teams left early, though whether it was due to the supposed difficulty or because it was short, I was not sure--and that there were more mapping and application questions (as that's the part of the event that I'm more interested in, lol).

Disease Detectives was similarly pretty decent quality, but it was also about 50% of the length of an ideal Disease Detectives test. Several teams left early from the event, and my partner and I were able to check over our test several times over. It was better than last year's test though.

I am disappointed by some of the errors that have occurred (Gravity Vehicle???), and I strongly believe that HUSO should have given back team's tests after Awards or, at the very least, attempt to mail them back in order to maintain more transparency... I'm also confident that Harvard will continue to improve with time! I can't begin to imagine the amount of time that goes into running two back-to-back tournaments TT___TT

[Ashernoel]

HUSO App and Event-Specific Feedback Report:
We piloted two new initiatives at HUSO last weekend: a supplementary iOS App, and event-specific feedback forms for every event. Competitors used the app to create a custom self-schedule and Apple Maps supported itinerary for the day and to submit feedback after their events with a feedback form, which we also linked on the home page of our website. We are excited to report on the results of both to the scioly community!

To begin, the app greatly surpassed expectations. It received 416 downloads by the end of the Division C tournament and 493 by the end of the Division B tournament. The app had 6,793 impressions and crashed zero times during both of the tournaments. From division-adjusted feedback form responses and downloads, we estimate that it had a near 50% penetration rate for Division C. It received favorable feedback (detailed below), and, besides a few bugs, seemed to make the competitor better experience on the whole for most competitors. Next year, my goals for the app are to make it cloud-based, cross-platform, and support multiple tournaments from within one app. Science Olympiad is a small market, but the app is a nice way to make the tournament experience more engaging for all parties involved.

In addition to scheduling, we used the app and our website asked for feedback about every event from every competitor. Competitors used keywords, provided by supervisors, to show they had actually competed in the event, and then some supervisors cross-checked who had submitted feedback forms to break ties during scoring and score counseling. The full results are below, with events ranked by their overall “STEM Rating,” the mean of the three preceding columns:


Full table: https://drive.google.com/file/d/112vBu3 ... sp=sharing

To my knowledge, this is the first time that any entity has collected such a large sample of student feedback about Science Olympiad events. The STEM questions are particularly interesting because they are theoretically independent of how the events were run at HUSO. For those curious about the wording of the questions, the full form is here: https://forms.gle/GdCWEMi4JX8in7tDA. I hope the National Science Olympiad will consider datasets like this when they consider their event slate and the future of the organization.

The app and event-specific forms worked harmoniously well together, and I am excited to see Science Olympiad continue to develop over the next couple of years.

Feedback from competitors and coaches about the App:
“I really enjoyed using the app, it helped me navigate my events and keep a clear schedule”
“I liked how the children were able to use the app and know their events.”
“Wish the app could also be on Android”
“More universal app”
“I also liked the app, helping us get from building to building. The directions to each room were also apparent which was very helpful.”
“Test difficulty was very high this year. Other than that, the overall experience was wonderful, staff were really nice, and the mobile app was amazing.”