MagLev C

[gorf250]

So what's the highest vehicle score people have seen at a competition? New York had a 1500 I think.

I heard about a 5000, though I think it was for a short distance

That's insane! Any idea about the mass and time, individually?

[Wolverine]

So what's the highest vehicle score people have seen at a competition? New York had a 1500 I think.

I heard about a 5000, though I think it was for a short distance

That's insane! Any idea about the mass and time, individually?[/quote

250g @ like .05 seconds. Not sure though.

[gorf250]

250g @ like .05 seconds. Not sure though.

Lawl thats pretty much impossible. About 100N of force? AKA equivalent to lifting 22 pounds. (If my mental math is correct)

[Stingray355]

Ours at State was 3150 actual although the official one was a bit higher(3460+) as a result of the issues with the scale I mentioned in an earlier post.The distance was 68.I am not sure if we had the best score at the event but I assume we were competitive. As I mentioned prior a device that weighed less than ours but had a similar magnet structure would have enjoyed the most benefit from the circumstances. We don't have access to any of those numbers so we have no way of confirming.
This brings me to one of my disappointments with many of the tournaments we compete in. Some will give us detailed copies of our own results , others don't. Sometimes we get rankings and of course we always know the top 5 by the end of the day. I know there are people that believe that giving out detailed results is not a good thing. I disagree. If you finished 2nd ( or any other ranking) in an event you may have just missed the top spot or you may have been completely dominated and need to look at all aspects of your performance to have a chance of competing next time. Since this is all about kids learning science, and much more of course, I think everyone would benefit from consistently receiving detailed results on all competitors not just ranking.
Imagine a football game where the scores were kept a secret until the end of the game, or beyond, and the teams did not receive the detailed info that would tell them if it was their offense, defense, special teams etc that was key to the result. It would be hard to learn from the experience and it would be hard for the coach to do their job properly. I hope this issue will be looked at and discussed and maybe we can have a uniform set of standards that will be used at all competitons and hopefully it will allow a more open reporting of results to all competitors/teams. I would also encourage a discussion about posting official results at the local, State and National level. Many teams have a few events that they are competitive in but as a team won't qualify for State or National competition. It might be very beneficial, and would certainly be interesting, for the teams to be able to access results that might help them understand how competitive they might have been had they been able to compete at the higher levels.

By the way some of the best teams we compete with have fairly well planned and comprehensive methods to monitor and gather information at the competitions they attend, and they benefit from this greatly. I don't want them to be restricted from this, it is smart and effective ,good for them. I would like to see all of the teams, regardless of size ,benefit from the same information.

[Balsa Man]

I could not agree more with your take on keeping scoring secret, for all the reasons you note, and more.
The only potential "justification" I can see is to avoid embarasment when volunteer ESs mess up scoring, and hassles when teams can see something got messed up- all you get to know is what you placed. That in my mind is actually a compelling reasons to be open.
My 2 cents.

[iwonder]

I helped run the tally room at our contest this year(we've got a little over 70 teams total I believe) and we definitely try hard to make sure all the teams get their tests back and everyone knows the rankings. The rankings are a non-issue, we need those to determine medals, but the issue is that in order to give everyone the graded tests back(and we try and give a blank test and answer key as well) it takes us about 8 people, a good hour or two, and it becomes a huge mess easily, so I can understand why some tournaments may not have the time or resources to do this.

[Stingray355]

We are more likely to receive appropriate information on the written test events than the build events like MagLev and Gravity Vehicle. When we are able to have a copy of our graded test and answer key and the ranking we have everything we need to evaluate our performance and to prepare for the next competition.
We had our State competition a couple of weeks ago. My sons partnered for MagLev and Gravity Vehicle and took 2nd place and 1st place medals. We still don't have copies of any of the official results on our own devices and certainly have no idea about any other teams efforts.

Typically the ES uses a spreadsheet to calculate scores and rank teams throughout the day so when the last team has made their runs they have all of the detailed info and ranking finalized on their laptop and ready to turn in. It seems to me that it would not be very difficult to post the official results to a local address or the State web site at that time and the coaches can access all of the detailed results electronically as soon as the awards ceremony has concluded.

Similar electronic methods could be used for the testing events to reduce the burdensome manual copying and organizing methods commonly used. I have been involved in planning and helping to run events I understand how challenging it can be and also that all sorts of unanticipated things can happen. These are long days for everyone but can be particualrly tough for some of the volunteers. I would not want any changes that made it more difficult for the great folks that give up their time to run these tournaments.

I have noticed that some tournaments seem to always be run better than others. Maybe we could promote , at all levels, a best practices manual/checklist/resource that all of the tournament hosts could utilize to help them prepare for and run a tournament.

To comment on Balsa Man's suggestion that maybe the motive for secrecy is to protect the adults when they make mistakes, I can't argue the point but I hope that is not the reason. This is supposed to be about students learning and competing and working as individuals as well as part of a team. They also learn from the behaviour of the adults around them. We all need to focus on attempting to run fair events where the best efforts of the teams can be accurately measured and to avoid having the results be tainted by known mistakes that some adult is reluctant to own up to. The kids work very hard they deserve better. I don't think it is possible to run a tournament completely free of mistakes why not handle them when they happen in a way that we can all be proud of. I think the kids know or suspect when things don't go right so why not be straight with them?

[iwonder]

This is getting slightly off topic, but I think you forgt that each of the builds has a paper form that students fill out(it's on the national web site) and those have to be sorted as well, just like the testing events. Also some teams may not want there exact scores and distances, times, etc revealed to everyone(see the pervious discussion on the boomilever topic about privacy). This excludes simply posting the ES's spreadsheets as is.

[Stingray355]

My original post was in response to a request for actual scores from MagLev tournaments. I simply added my own personal opinion about the lack of accurate official data, including their own numbers sometimes, that the teams have access to after a competition. I understand why some teams would prefer their details be kept a secret that serves our team well as often as not. However if one of the goals is to inspire kids to learn more about science,data is often an important aspect of that pursuit.
If your point is that the policy is a result of a particular team not wanting to share details of their performance should we use the same approach in other matters? Should any particular team be able to dictate the specifics of the rules and regulations at these tournaments? I don't see that as the best solution or even as something that sets a level playing field. Whatever we do I would hope it would be consistent across all competitions.

Let me give 3 quick examples of experiences we have had:
1. A school sends a team of volunteers to run an event at a local invitational. They collect detailed data on all competing schools including taking closeup photos of our device and videos of our runs. They also go home with all of the numbers for every school that attended that day. The rest of the teams have none of this info to take back home with them.
2. A powerhouse SO team in our region admitted to me that they used the time that one of our devices was in impound at the invitational they were hosting to have their people give our device a closeup detailed exam to try to reverse engineer it. He then admitted they couldn't figure out certain details and since our team had just been eliminated from going any further would we explain to them how we did it.
3. Some teams in our region bring people to monitor various events and take photos and notes on any info that they can overhear. Sometimes they use parents and grandparents and it is easy to spot the "spies" Those teams harvest a wealth of data that the rest of us don't have any access to. I think this is very smart and it is clearly effective but I have to tell you I would really like to have access to the same info they have and think that is only fair. Better access to detailed data might make all of the teams better.

I have no interest in hijacking this forum and would be happy to post my comments in a more appropriate place if you would be so kind as to point the way out. I am interested in being part of the solution not part of the problem and I assume all of the other folks that show up here share that interest.
Thanks for your comment.

[iwonder]

If your point is that the policy is a result of a particular team not wanting to share details of their performance should we use the same approach in other matters?

Last comment I'll make

No, I don't agree that a single team can dictate what details are shared at the tournament, but I do think that the teams should have control of their own data. The sad fact of this is that it would be logistically very difficult to keep track of what teams are fine with their performance being shared and which aren't, so we just default to a closed system where we'll share whatever the ES gives us(which is typically just a ranking sheet). It's a sad thing, but the alternative is that it'd take hours longer to get the awards ready to go or we'd have to ship all the packets to teams after the contest, neither of which have seemed to be worth it at this point. I guess it just depends on how many people you have to help and how much time you can put into it.