New Jersey 2014

[magicalforest]

Haha our building events aren't too strong. We're losing two builders, and apparently there aren't many good builders in the rising classes. Wonderful.

Why is Union so much better? Wasn't there once a Regional held at Princeton University?

Just remember guys to please ask your coaches to contact the state director. If you feel the State tournament could have been improved, just go talk to your coach. Go email them tonight or something (so you don't forget) and say something like, "Hey, could I talk to you on Monday about Science Olympiad?"

Just have your coaches tell her something like, "I feel this event could have been better...". Make sure that they tell the state director that there's a group (Scioly at MIT) willing to write tests for her and resolve a lot of her problems.

If you guys want to make sure others in the NJ SO committee know about your suggestions, make comments on Facebook or Twitter.

[nxtscholar]

@SilverNight: Well, anyways, good luck next year and congrats on the accomplishments this year. We should probably start PM-ing each other, unless the other New Jerseyians find something amusing or helpful in this (long) conversation, lolol

[nxtscholar]

4th at ELG, 3rd in Mission Possible, and 7th in Boomilever isn't that bad....and Scrambler was just bad luck (I saw what happened). In my own opinion and experience, good building is quick to learn. You just need patient folks.

I'm not sure what you mean by why is Union so much more better? Elaborate?

Yeah yeah. Of course. In the mean time, I'll try and get other users/schools on the same page.

[magicalforest]

Whenever I talk to the builders, they always have this glum look on their face "we could have done so much better." And I guess we always compare ourselves to South. Who somehow get top 3 in all their building events. How do they even do that? (General statement, didn't look closely at this year's results...) But I guess the studiers say the same too.

The Scrambler builder was so angry at the building infraction. During the 2nd run, a piece touched the ground, but then the supervisor said "He thought he heard something fall the 1st run too" so neither run was counted. But he was so angry because the supervisor told him AFTER the 2nd run and discounted the 1st run, and he could have made a 10 second adjustment that would have made all the difference... But I'm not too sure about the specifics.

Yeah, I was about to say. UCC is probably the best practice regional leading up to states, not to mention the same county; a lot of good teams usually come (East Brunswick, South Brunswick, Princeton HS, Montgomery, JP Stevens , the Plainsboros, etc.) Hillsborough was a nice touch this year

I was referring to what you said. Why is UCC the best regional?

[nxtscholar]

Whenever I talk to the builders, they always have this glum look on their face "we could have done so much better." And I guess we always compare ourselves to South. Who somehow get top 3 in all their building events. How do they even do that? (General statement, didn't look closely at this year's results...)

The Scrambler builder was so angry at the building infraction. During the 2nd run, a piece touched the ground, but then the supervisor said "He thought he heard something fall the 1st run too" so neither run was counted. But he was so angry because the supervisor told him AFTER the 2nd run and discounted the 1st run, and he could have made a 10 second adjustment that would have made all the difference... But I'm not too sure about the specifics.

Yeah, I was about to say. UCC is probably the best practice regional leading up to states, not to mention the same county; a lot of good teams usually come (East Brunswick, South Brunswick, Princeton HS, Montgomery, JP Stevens , the Plainsboros, etc.) Hillsborough was a nice touch this year

I was referring to what you said. Why is UCC the best regional?

Haha, yeah....it was the fact that in the rules, whatever isn't touching the ground before the launch can't be touching the ground after the launch. Yeah, so they all spent a good minute wasting time arguing whether the first run should have been counted or not, while the allocated 10 minutes ran down. They probably could have done "so much better"; they're Scrambler was one of the most accurate I saw.

And the plot twist? I saw the coordinator telling teams to put paper where their weights would've fell (and hence incur a violation) just cause he didn't like that rule. Well, that pretty much saved 5 teams from being tiered.

Oh, I mean, like I said before, considering that 7 out of the 10 teams that placed in the top ten were from UCC, I'd consider UCC the best regional in terms of competition. I mean, it's all nice and all going to NJIT for instance and dominating the competition, but are you actually learning something? Are you truly seeing where you lie with the rest of the competition? In my opinion, UCC is practically the same thing as states because most of the good teams that you should watch out for at states all go to UCC.

[Celestite]

The Scrambler builder was so angry at the building infraction. During the 2nd run, a piece touched the ground, but then the supervisor said "He thought he heard something fall the 1st run too" so neither run was counted. But he was so angry because the supervisor told him AFTER the 2nd run and discounted the 1st run, and he could have made a 10 second adjustment that would have made all the difference... But I'm not too sure about the specifics.

I'm just going to jump into the conversation. That really sucks, magicalforest. I was actually there watching when WWP-N was doing their scramber. I remember thinking that it could have been the first place winner if not for that minor infraction. It was completely unfair of the supervisors, and in my opinion, you should have appealed for a higher score

[nxtscholar]

Don't get me wrong or anything. I agree that the supervisor could have been better in certain regards. He practically helped 5 teams score higher than WWP North. But I don't see how the supervisor was unfair in simply enacting a rule he didn't even like in the first place when he had to.

[Celestite]

It was definitely unfair of the supervisors to tell WWP-N that the first run didn't count after the second run. Also, as magicalforest said, they argued the 10 minutes of setup away. I was there when it happened, and it was definitely unfair to WWP-N. They worked so hard on their scramber, and lost the medal due to a minor infraction that really could have been easily avoided if they said that the first run didn't count and WWP-N fixed their Scramber in the 10 minutes they had for their second run.

That's just my opinion though. I suppose that the judges didn't really have a choice. They had to follow the rules.

[nxtscholar]

Oh well....what school are you from by the way? Did you do scrambler too?

[Celestite]

Nah, I was just there to watch the Scrambler event. Coincidentally, I saw WWP-N go.

I'm from UCVTS. I did the events Designer Genes and Rocks and Minerals (Yes that means SilverNight knows exactly who I am. Hey ) For Rocks, they got the test exactly from online. (This one, word for word)I went back home and looked it up and compared answers. I got only 1 wrong, taking the test based on what I knew and not what I remembered from the online test I studied hard too, it was just that I looked over the tests before regionals and didn't look at that specific test right before the competition, so I messed up. Still, I thought that taking the test from online was something that didn't measure our abilities, and the supervisors really could have done better.