Efficiencies you have gotten?

[nejanimb]

Winning scores for yeaterday's VA regional were in the 80-90 range for both divisions.

Most impressive thing I saw all day was one team's 880 gram tower.

[Balsa Man]

Winning scores for yeaterday's VA regional were in the 80-90 range for both divisions.

Most impressive thing I saw all day was one team's 880 gram tower.

I have to wonder - and of course no way to tell - if the level testing base issue has anything to do with some tournaments "coming in low" (like VA in the 80-90 range), (while others have some really high scoring...? It could, of course, just be which Regions have really good builders, and which don't.... A clue would be if most of the failures are "going"/happening in the same direction. Going to a height of 70cm is "new territory" for Science-O; a mm of lean in a 20cm high bridge, no big deal; taken up to 70cm, that would be over 3mm- premature failure is going to happen.....

[SLM]

Winning scores for yeaterday's VA regional were in the 80-90 range for both divisions.

Most impressive thing I saw all day was one team's 880 gram tower.

I have to wonder - and of course no way to tell - if the level testing base issue has anything to do with some tournaments "coming in low" (like VA in the 80-90 range), .....

In this particular tournament, some of the teams were not using their "best" towers to compete. I know of at least two teams (one in Division B and one in Division C) that have much more competitive towers than what was showcased at the tournament. Interesting, the team that came first in Division C this year, competed with a tower that they had built last year. As far as I know, leveling did not pose any problem at the tournament.

[Balsa Man]

Not showing....all your cards at Regionals certainly makes sense (we're going to go somewhat conservative at Regionals, too). Any event supervisors that have been doing this for a while will likely understand the importance of working carefully to level things best as possible.

I've got to ask, did the 880 hild full??

[nejanimb]

SLM, I figured there was some of that going on. I know that VA regionals don't really matter very much, and I think the C division winners knew coming in that they would be able to win with last year's tower completely unmodified and save their best work for later. I've often wondered how such strategizing might be done most effectively – for instance, this team, knowing that their competition for towers in VA is fairly weak, might be best served spending zero effort on towers all year and using last year's device exclusively. There would be pretty much no chance they would drop out of the top 3 spots even at States, and could spend all of that time spent working on towers on other events. Personally, I know that I enjoyed working on bridges enough that even once we knew we didn't have to compete that heavily in order to optimize time spent on the event for the benefit of our overall team score, I still wanted to keep working on it just to do better in this event because I was passionate about it. Perhaps not as solid a strategy for SO in general though.

Balsa Man, that's definitely a possibility. I only saw a few towers that went to the full 70cm, but I definitely still did my best to keep the tables level for all of the competitors. I had a simple bubble level and checked the tables regularly in both directions, and the new tables VA SO bought had screws in the legs that I could use to level (far better than the "shove stuff under certain feet while also trying to be sure that the legs missing bracings had a chain to hold them together" I had to do last year), but I can easily imagine that there were still issues there. Now, as an event supervisor, I know it's my responsibility to make the tables as level as I could so the students had the best environment to test in, but I also think that competitors have to build their designs expecting a certain reasonable margin of error on behalf of the equipment.

But, my conjecture would be that no, the equipment was not the reason for relatively low winning scores. It was much more a product, I'd say, of VA not being particularly strong in tower building except perhaps for a few teams that were holding back their best work.

And yes, the 880 easily held full. I don't know what we could have possibly done to break it. It was quite a behemoth.

[SLM]

... It was much more a product, I'd say, of VA not being particularly strong in tower building except perhaps for a few teams that were holding back their best work.

You are absolutely correct here; VA teams are generally weak in engineering events. And although there are always a few individuals who excel in their events, and consequently propel their teams forward, as a whole VA teams are not adequately prepared to be competitive nationally in these events. Based on my observations during the past five years, I don't see an end to this problem unless Virginia Science Olympiad Board and the participating schools work towards developing a meaningful and effective SO engineering curriculum for their students.

[fishman100]

Congrats to all the teams at (the other) VA Regionals!

Winning efficiency for Div C was 47.349 and B was 71.509.

[Balsa Man]

Northern Colorado, C-div; top 3 points were 75, 69, 66. Our 75-pointer was at 12.96gr/70cm, held full. Second was an 8gr/70cm,held 8.95kg. B-div was tighter at the top; ~70, 69,66

[Balsa Man]

Northern Colorado, C-div; top 3 points were 75, 69, 66. Our 75-pointer was at 12.96gr/70cm, held full. Second was an 8gr/70cm,held 8.95kg. B-div was tighter at the top; ~70, 69,66

[dholdgreve]

We ran Div B Towers at the West Liberty Invitational yesterday... It took at least an 80 point score to even get a ribbon (8th place). The top 4 scores were over 100, with the winner scoring over 104. 29 teams participated. All teams but 2 remained in tier 1... Many good... (I take that back)... GREAT builders out there!