Illinois 2011

[XJcwolfyX]

[courage7856]

Can't wait to see some of you at Central tomorrow! For those who want to find me, I'm on Crystal Lake South JV, and since I hurt my wrist again this week, I'll be wearing an ugly black brace. Best of luck!

[chia]

Can't wait to see some of you at Central tomorrow! For those who want to find me, I'm on Crystal Lake South JV, and since I hurt my wrist again this week, I'll be wearing an ugly black brace. Best of luck!

Yep yep! I feel so unprepared... T.T
Baw, I had one of those braces once. Not cool (hopefully not your dominant hand, y/y?)

[courage7856]

Can't wait to see some of you at Central tomorrow! For those who want to find me, I'm on Crystal Lake South JV, and since I hurt my wrist again this week, I'll be wearing an ugly black brace. Best of luck!

Yep yep! I feel so unprepared... T.T
Baw, I had one of those braces once. Not cool (hopefully not your dominant hand, y/y?)

It is. Quite annoying, but I've been struggling with it for a while, so I'm used to it. I also am extremely freaking out. I don't have a clue how well our Mission Possible will work, and I know I'm not the only one. One of my varsity senior friends has to build a bass clef percussion instrument, robot, and find a duet for an instrument in treble and an instrument in bass clef tonight. He claims sleep is highly overrated. I'm inclined to agree.

[chia]

Oh oh oh kjhsscioly and I met you! (for five seconds, hehe). Congratulations on first place ornitho for your division, did you see your raw score? You guys did really well! (Wasn't that a horrible test, by the way? They're never good when they're so easy, esp. since we get so many resources. Meh.)
Were you guys told who won overall? I don't think we know yet.

[kjhsscioly]

Yep, you beat many of the varsity teams! How was fossils?

Don't worry, sleep is overrated in our team too. Highly overrated...

But, CLC was good, with golds in fossils and ornithology.

[courage7856]

I haven't actually seen any of my raw scores. My Mission Possible box came unscrewed on the five minute bus ride (how did that happen? Oh well, it was a fail anyway), so I had to put it in my car and left before I saw them. I'll get them tomorrow. I did think that the test was easy. I can't believe I missed one of them- I think it was a Green Heron, but I totally blanked. On most of the others, I didn't need notes or a field guide at all. But it was good practice for my new partner.

Fossils turned out to be more about dating and stuff like that than ID and stuff like that. A lot of modes of preservation, too. I got second, which was pretty awesome. Improvement over last year. But it's funny, because one of the guys on our varsity team who did fossils hates ID and fossil things, but he got first in Dynamic Planet, so he had a great day.

The other event I did was Experimental Design, since 2/3 of those people didn't show up, and the one who did didn't have a clue what we were doing. We had to design an experiment using ketchup, mustard, salt, and pepper. Unsurprisingly, I did not medal.

So, how did your other events go? I saw you had quite a collection of medals. I'm interested in seeing how the other events were. I heard Microbe Mission involved labeling parts of a microscope? Wow. . .

[kjhsscioly]

Chia and I saw our raw scores, and ornithology was very close margins all around.It was a pretty easy test, mostly just looking up stuff like diet if needed. We got all of the ID right, except for one of the calls (mockingbird). Fossils was okay, but my partner thinks it may have been written by a rocks and minerals person, because it was all about dating and such. On fossils, we got all of the multiple choice right except the question about whether igneous rock would make fossils harder or easier to date, and stations went equally well.
I heard experimental design wasn't too good. My team's experiment was so funny. They measured the coefficient of friction between the packets of condiments and the wooden ruler. I think they missed the point of the condiments.
As for mission possible, the JV team mislabeled their thing, so the JV and Varsity scores were switched around. The real MP people were not happy, and the JV people who went up to grab "their" third place medals accidentally took the 1st place medals.

Ornithology did have a green heron, and I agree, the notes were useless. We used our field guide just a little, to check on dimorphism and migrations. What field guide did you use?

[courage7856]

We measured approximate surface area of absorption on the napkin using the most unscientific way of measuring possible ( we only had a single ruler- what were we supposed to do?). Most teams did something similar. We wanted to do something with viscosity (we made our pepper and salt aqueous to make things easier), but weren't sure how to measure it.

I'll get my scores back tomorrow and I'll be able to compare on the tests. I know we missed a couple of bird calls. We really didn't study them, which is too bad, because my partner and I are both musicians so they should be easy points. I agree on the Fossils test. There were a lot of half-life questions too, and when I saw them I was thinking "crap" because I got one wrong on my last math final. But they were pretty easy- all 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.

My Mission was a fail. That's all I have to say about that.

I still can't believe I failed on that Green Heron. I want to go bang my head against a wall. We used our field guide mostly to double check on ID, since I pretty much had them. I remember using it on the nonbreeding plumage of the Laughing Gull. I used the Peterson, and my partner had the Stokes, I believe. It was a nice contrast, because I had paintings and she had photographs. We had been bored after finishing at one station, and were looking at a picture of a bunch of Black Skimmers in the cover flap, and then there was a station with them, so that made my day. Other than the Heron, I was confident on all of the ID. But still, there's always that moment when you get first in something where you get all depressed because you don't think you're getting a medal.

[lllazar]

So the fossils test was more geological huh, any truly difficult questions that stood out to you guys?