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oh, okay. then i guess it would be best to practice without the container. thanks!

2win wrote:oh, okay. then i guess it would be best to practice without the container. thanks!

I recommend practicing both with and without the container, so you don't become reliant on it but you also are familiar with using it, should the opportunity arise.

I'm not sure how you could rely on it if each lab that you're doing is different. I'd say practice with it every time. You'll be able to use it in the competition, and if you need it then, you'll use it. Why should you take it away from your practicing?

This really isn't an event you can specifically practice for, though, since there aren't set scenarios. It's good to familiarize yourself with the event, but practicing over and over again isn't really going to do much, IMHO.

binary010101 wrote:This really isn't an event you can specifically practice for, though, since there aren't set scenarios. It's good to familiarize yourself with the event, but practicing over and over again isn't really going to do much, IMHO.

In the case of my team, I'd have to disagree. We would never have done as well in competition if we hadn't practiced repeatedly. As weird as it sounds, improvising on the spot is a skill you can practice. It's also improvisation within relatively specific parameters, so practicing within those parameters does help specifically.

For practicing, I kind of think somewhere between you two. Certainly some practice needs to be done, however, I mainly think that's to make sure that everyone knows how to do each part, and to make sure that the way that we divide it up seems okay timewise. I think if you just have a couple of practice tests where you get your coach to put out some materials for you and then grade it afterward, you'll be fine.

Most of the practices I've done have been focused on the layout of the event, not on the exact experiments that we were performing. They were all about getting used to the time limit, figuring out which team members were going to do what, and figuring out how the event supervisers wanted us to organize our write ups. It was great to get used to my team. I know that I would be helpless without them.

Our team practiced a little, but I think experimental design relies more on intuition rather than intellect.

That's part of what I love about Experimental Design. There's a lot of strategy involved, which is not something I can say about many other SO events.

rizzyz wrote:Most of the practices I've done have been focused on the layout of the event, not on the exact experiments that we were performing.

That's sort of what I was saying. Because of labs that we've done in school, we didn't need to practice doing each part so much, but more of which parts each of us would do.

Well, the idea behind practicing certainly isn't to try and guess the actual situation you'll be given, but rather to get comfortable with your team and your strategy, and the layout of the event. However, the best way to do this is still to set up practice events and run them under competition conditions, so you'll be ready for the way it will actually be run, and everyone will know exactly what to do.