Building Event Efficiency

[Coach Marz]

Post your Building Event Efficiencies here.

Solar Power.... Best temperature increase
Egg-o-naut......Best time with bonus
Elevated Bridge.... Best Efficiency
Electric Vehicle.... High Score, Closest to the line
Trajectory...... Accuracy at heights

[Coach Marz]

I will start
Solar .... 4-8 degrees depending on height
Egg-o-naut..... 24
Electric Vehicle.... 191
Trajectory... Still Testing
Elevted Bridge.... 450

Sharing score value should only help students. It will give you an idea of where you might place at competition and what can possibly be achieved if students post scores higher than you. If others post lower than your scors you can assume you are doing a good job. If they post higher than your scores, assume there is more work to be done.

[andrewwski]

Efficiency might not be the best description for all of those. How about "scores?"

I'm going to refrain until I'm done competing for the year.

[rocketman1555]

same here, sorry, but i don't want other people to know how well i'm doing until after i compete

[Glacierguy1]

I don't think my other team members would appreciate me putting their scores up, but I will tell you that I am getting 7.5 in solar power

[zbuilder]

I tried to post these a while ago but the post seemed to have evaporated into cyberspace.

I don't know what solar power is so I can't help you with that.

Trajectory... 0
Electric vehicle... 199.7
Egg-o-naut... 61
Elevated bridge haven't tested one yet.

But I need to add an important warning about the meaning of these scores. A couple of years ago I got a score of over 10 minutes (that's right 600 seconds) on a bottle rocket. It had a large parachute and it clearly caught an updraft. My dad and I followed it in the car but finally lost sight of it and it was higher than when we first launched it. That rocket would pretty regularly do 45 seconds but at nationals it wouldn't work at all (fortunately my partner had brought some others and we got silver). I have gotten zero error on my trajectory many times, even in competition, but if there is any wind it is anyones guess where the ball will land. I did wheeled vehicle (similar to electric vehicle but without electricity) and I could consistently get under 1mm distance error and less then 1% timing error. Many times I got near zero aiming error, but at Nationals I couldn't aim better than 1-2 cm to the right each time. I got silver because I couldn't always do zero aiming error and that day it just didn't work out.

The point is that it is possible to get some great scores some times but if you want to win based on skill rather than luck you need to be able to do it every time. The scores I gave you are the best I have been able to do so far but I can't get those scores every time.

As to bridge, the best scores 3 and 4 years ago (the last time bridge was run) were 3.8 grams and holding almost all 15KG in 06 (about 3200 I think) and 3.2 grams holding 13+ KG in 05 (I think the efficiency was 3800, or maybe it was 4200, I can't remember) in 05, but the rules those years allowed a much lighter bridge because they didn't require as much strength in the beams. This year I would expect about 6 grams holding almost all the weight will win at nationals (about 2000-2500 efficiency).

I don't know why SO doesn't post scores. I think that posting the scores helps to avoid scoring errors and gives competitors some idea of what level of competition they need to prepare for. If you live in a region or state where there are no really good bridge builders you may come to Nationals with a 15 gram bridge, thinking that will be competitive, or you might think that a 15 cm error on trajectory will get you a gold if nobody in your state did better then that. In the real olympics every athlete knows what everyone elses best time has been, before they get to Bejing.

[dudeincolorado]

same here, sorry, but i don't want other people to know how well i'm doing until after i compete

How would that effect the competition? If anything I think it would freak me out more. Like If you said you have a 500 bridge I would go into a hole and not come out.

I got a 150 on my e bridge the first time... but its going to drop

[binary010101]

Drop? Like going from 150 to 50?

[rocketman1555]

same here, sorry, but i don't want other people to know how well i'm doing until after i compete

How would that effect the competition? If anything I think it would freak me out more. Like If you said you have a 500 bridge I would go into a hole and not come out.

I got a 150 on my e bridge the first time... but its going to drop

it gives people a score to aim at, and i would prefer to come out of the blue, then to have a target painted on my back

what state are you in zbuilder?

[zbuilder]

How do you know going in if you are even going to be competitve if you don't know how other people have done in the past. I can't spend infinite time building the best possible bridge, trajectory, electric vehicle, whatever. I have been very competitive in the past but I always have to guess how good the competition will be, mostly I over estimate the competition, but in towers I underestimated it 2 years ago. In the olymipics, which we are supposedly modeled after, everyone knows how well the competition has done in past events. There are surely surprises, but not to the extent that someone thinks a 8 minute mile will win when there are many competitors who are doing under 4 minutes. I am not saying that SO should publish every score of every test you do on a bridge, but I think that scores in competition should be published.

By the way there is one other reason that I believe that scores should be published. I have been to a competition where I watched Storm the Castle and then saw a team that should have been in perhpas 10th place end up getting second. It was obvious that there had been an error in the scoring, the kids who won looked like they were in shock, but there was no way for anyone to have questioned it because nobody knew the scores. If the Event Coordinator had announced the score I am sure that there would have been appeals, because anyone who knew how the scoring was done knew that that team had done terribly (I estimated they had zero points, actually less then zero) compared to the others. I assume the event coordinator miscalculated the score, but how would anyone know if they couldn't see the scores.