How to host a new satellite invitational?

[ishaanp12]

Hello, I'm wondering how to host/start a new Science Olympiad satellite invitational. I'm already a part of an existing team and we want to host a satellite invitation in the fall of 2024. How do we start? Is there a form we fill out to register? Is there a premade website to host the competition through or should we make our own? I'm really just looking for how to start/get registered. Thanks!

[jgrischow1]

Check with your state tourney director. Many people use Scilympiad to host satellite invites; that's probably your best bet.

[knightmoves]

You also want to coordinate with your state organization, because you don't want to host your tournament at the same time as some other nearby school will host theirs. And your state organization will probably help advertise your tournament, if they know about it.

Scilympiad works reasonably well, but has a bit of a learning curve. If you're going to host an event in Scilympiad, you want to make sure you've practiced with it beforehand.

And there are always teething problems - particularly with middle schools with locked-down school chromebooks. Every scilympiad competition we've done has actually been scilympiad, plus this external channel to submit videos of builds, and photos of builds, and here's this three-page pdf that we want you to print out, fill in during the test, scan, and submit to some random google form. One of our coaches tells a story of a school who had clearly put their sheets though a big scanner/copier/email machine, but not understood the settings, and so only submitted the odd-numbered pages.

So if you haven't used scilympiad before, do a trial run.