Technical Problem Solving C

[scienceolympiadist]

anything involving math, physics, chemistry is possible

[ktrujillo52]

They just have you do a bunch of basic labs that may involve any branch of science. It's really fun.

[smarticle13]

oh, it sounds pretty cool

[Flavorflav]

Does anyone know how to do problem #5 from last year's nationals? You can hold the dime out until it just covers the ball, then use the probe to get the distance to the dime (a) and the ball (b), but then what? You would either need the angle or the diameter of the dime, and according to the listed materials you don't have a way to measure either one. Any thoughts?

[theproblemsolver]

Does anyone have the past technical problem solving test from nationals that they would like to share? If so could you send me a pm?

[E Edgar]

You know, I definitely think that this event works better as one test instead of stations. That way, you have time to think about the questions and aren't rushing around to stations.

What do you guys think?

[Sir_L_Jenkins]

Does anyone know of the breakdown of the Nat's scoring of tech trek? I'm kind of curious on how they broke ties/graded the 5 stations. Anyway, any thoughts on the event? I for one thoroughly enjoyed my free bottle of water.

[scienceolympiadist]

What were you supposed to do for the 1st station with the pendulum? You could've figured it out without doing the experiment.

[Sir_L_Jenkins]

I think you were supposed to determine the length of the 10cm and 100cm pendulum experimentally using the graphs, i.e. not simply just using the formula. If you found the length of those three pendulums and found their period, you could graph the period squared versus time to get a straight line, then just use that to line to extrapolate to 10 cm or 100 cm

[nejanimb]

That's what we did - period vs. sqrt(length) and made a linear regression, and then plugged in to get the values for the other two.

Then again, we got 32nd, so :-/.