Event Supervising

[ScottMaurer19]

Speaking of safety checks, can we talk about lead? I had two devices that used lead weights, and given the wording of 3j I had to consider them to have violated the safety clause in 2c, which means participation only. Does that strike anyone else as unnecessarily harsh?

3j explicitly calls out lead as not being permitted. There's no judgement call here at all - lead is not allowed. I'd think you could allow the teams to remove their lead safely and compete without it under 2c - but what counts as "remove it safely" is an ES judgement call.

Tungsten weights are readily available - there's no need for anyone to be handling lead.

Tungsten may be available but I have not been able to find 500g masses that aren't extremely expensive.

[Unome]

Speaking of safety checks, can we talk about lead? I had two devices that used lead weights, and given the wording of 3j I had to consider them to have violated the safety clause in 2c, which means participation only. Does that strike anyone else as unnecessarily harsh?

3j explicitly calls out lead as not being permitted. There's no judgement call here at all - lead is not allowed. I'd think you could allow the teams to remove their lead safely and compete without it under 2c - but what counts as "remove it safely" is an ES judgement call.

Tungsten weights are readily available - there's no need for anyone to be handling lead.

Tungsten may be available but I have not been able to find 500g masses that aren't extremely expensive.

I also found the lead ban to be rather harsh, considering there are plenty of ways to safely handle lead (and we're already fine with nichrome wire out in the open...).

[CookiePie1]

Speaking of safety checks, can we talk about lead? I had two devices that used lead weights, and given the wording of 3j I had to consider them to have violated the safety clause in 2c, which means participation only. Does that strike anyone else as unnecessarily harsh?

3j explicitly calls out lead as not being permitted. There's no judgement call here at all - lead is not allowed. I'd think you could allow the teams to remove their lead safely and compete without it under 2c - but what counts as "remove it safely" is an ES judgement call.

Tungsten weights are readily available - there's no need for anyone to be handling lead.

Tungsten may be available but I have not been able to find 500g masses that aren't extremely expensive.

If anything, students can ask around and see if their physics teachers have masses, which are readily available in my school. In the worst-case scenario students could even just fill a water bottle with sand if they really needed to.

[TheSquaad]

3j explicitly calls out lead as not being permitted. There's no judgement call here at all - lead is not allowed. I'd think you could allow the teams to remove their lead safely and compete without it under 2c - but what counts as "remove it safely" is an ES judgement call.

Tungsten weights are readily available - there's no need for anyone to be handling lead.

Tungsten may be available but I have not been able to find 500g masses that aren't extremely expensive.

If anything, students can ask around and see if their physics teachers have masses, which are readily available in my school. In the worst-case scenario students could even just fill a water bottle with sand if they really needed to.

An even easier solution is to get 4 rolls of 50 pennies. They weigh a bit over 500g, are fairly compact, and are probably the cheapest weight you’re going to find.

[marty3]

Tungsten may be available but I have not been able to find 500g masses that aren't extremely expensive.

If anything, students can ask around and see if their physics teachers have masses, which are readily available in my school. In the worst-case scenario students could even just fill a water bottle with sand if they really needed to.

An even easier solution is to get 4 rolls of 50 pennies. They weigh a bit over 500g, are fairly compact, and are probably the cheapest weight you’re going to find.

The best weight I've ever seen at a tournament was a stack of Science Olympiad medals. It probably cost the competitors less than $2 to put together, and the medals are presumably not made of lead. I deemed it safe.

[windu34]

Tungsten may be available but I have not been able to find 500g masses that aren't extremely expensive.

If anything, students can ask around and see if their physics teachers have masses, which are readily available in my school. In the worst-case scenario students could even just fill a water bottle with sand if they really needed to.

An even easier solution is to get 4 rolls of 50 pennies. They weigh a bit over 500g, are fairly compact, and are probably the cheapest weight you’re going to find.

+1 to the pennies

[PM2017]

If anything, students can ask around and see if their physics teachers have masses, which are readily available in my school. In the worst-case scenario students could even just fill a water bottle with sand if they really needed to.

An even easier solution is to get 4 rolls of 50 pennies. They weigh a bit over 500g, are fairly compact, and are probably the cheapest weight you’re going to find.

The best weight I've ever seen at a tournament was a stack of Science Olympiad medals. It probably cost the competitors less than $2 to put together, and the medals are presumably not made of lead. I deemed it safe.

This makes me hurt on the inside...

[nicholasmaurer]

Just ran regional yesterday with an impound, and I honestly have no idea how anyone does it without an impound unless the competition is tiny. One of my assistants had run a fairly large invitational without impound, and he said it was a nightmare. If a lot of teams use their thirty minute setup (and all the good ones do), that only leaves you twenty minutes to run the whole block. Sure, some are over in a second, but quite a few run the full three minutes and sometimes you have to go to video to make a call. Four decent devices is about the max you can count on doing in twenty minutes in my experience.

We avoid this scheduling problem by putting people into 15 minutes blocks at the Solon HS invitational.

The simplest reason to not do impound until State Tournaments is because the rules say not to...

One team per block? That could accommodate at most thirty teams if you give supervisors a lunch break, and since you'd virtually always have more than one thing going on at a time you would need a minimum of five supervisors. I don't think you can do a decent job of judging a complicated device with less than four pairs of eyes, and you need another person to be watching the team setting up, and you are giving a huge advantage to the later teams as I suggested above.

No, we run 15 minutes blocks with 3 teams/block. The whole operation will require 15-20 volunteers if you include judges, timers, and score entry.

[Flavorflav]

We avoid this scheduling problem by putting people into 15 minutes blocks at the Solon HS invitational.

The simplest reason to not do impound until State Tournaments is because the rules say not to...

One team per block? That could accommodate at most thirty teams if you give supervisors a lunch break, and since you'd virtually always have more than one thing going on at a time you would need a minimum of five supervisors. I don't think you can do a decent job of judging a complicated device with less than four pairs of eyes, and you need another person to be watching the team setting up, and you are giving a huge advantage to the later teams as I suggested above.

No, we run 15 minutes blocks with 3 teams/block. The whole operation will require 15-20 volunteers if you include judges, timers, and score entry.

15-20? Lol. You live in a different world, my friend.

[Unome]

One team per block? That could accommodate at most thirty teams if you give supervisors a lunch break, and since you'd virtually always have more than one thing going on at a time you would need a minimum of five supervisors. I don't think you can do a decent job of judging a complicated device with less than four pairs of eyes, and you need another person to be watching the team setting up, and you are giving a huge advantage to the later teams as I suggested above.

No, we run 15 minutes blocks with 3 teams/block. The whole operation will require 15-20 volunteers if you include judges, timers, and score entry.

15-20? Lol. You live in a different world, my friend.

That was my thought... I last ran Mission with 2 people to help.