User:TheBirdyBirdyBird

TheBirdyBirdyBird (Birdy) is a bird that attends SSA. He has participated in Science Olympiad for three years, but the first year doesn't really count. Though he is not able to participate much of the time, he somehow manages to do decently and prefers to think that he carries all of his main events.

2023-2024 Season

After the Division B team got disbanded, Birdy joined the division C team. During this year, he explored many (MANY) new events and finally started doing builds. He also became much more active in the SciOly community, finally beginning to talk in the discord servers.

Event	Dick Smith Memorial	SOAPS	CMU	Mentor	Regionals	States	Avg.
Astronomy	9th	TRIALED	1st	1st	1st	6th	3.60
Codebusters	2nd	4th	1st	8th	1st	4nd	3.33
Fermi Questions	2nd	16th	1st	1st	1st	5th	4.33
Fossils	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	7th	13th	10.0
Geologic Mapping	N/A	21st	7th	16th	1st	13th	11.6
Robot Tour	19th	7th	5th	10th	1st	1st	7.17
Tower	N/A	N/A	N/A	7th	1st	5th	4.33
Avg.	8.00	12.0	3.00	7.17	1.86	6.71	6.00
Avg. w/o Subs	8.00	9.00	2.00	5.40	1.00	4.86	4.79

2022-2023 Season

This is when Birdy started actually focusing on Science Olympiad instead of procrastinating on other stuff. He had finally found some events that he enjoyed doing (and that he often had to carry, cough cough Solar System cough cough). Overall, Bird did decently this season and only ended up bombing when he was substituted. He also learned the importance of sleep (only for Codebusters) after being traumatized by sixth place.

Anyways, here are his results:

Event	Dick Smith Memorial	Mentor	University of Michigan	Regionals	States	Nationals	Avg.
Bio Process Lab	N/A	N/A	14th	N/A	N/A	N/A	14
Codebusters	10th	5th	6th	1st	2nd	7th	5.33
Fast Facts	2nd	3rd	2nd	1st	1st	6th	2.50
Solar System	5th	2nd	1st	1st	1st	17th	4.50
Wheeled Vehicle	N/A	N/A	4th	N/A	N/A	25th	4.83
Avg.	5.67	3.33	5.60	1.00	1.33	13.75	5.57*
Avg. w/o Subs	5.67	3.33	3.00	1.00	1.33	10.00	4.06*

*total average across all placements. Not average of averages.

Competition Review (idea by Aptdon)

I guess this has turned into a competition summary as well.

Dick Smith Memorial Invitational

The first invitational of Bird's season. He came into it not really knowing what he was doing (it was a long time since 2022 Nats) and did not know how much better he had gotten by doing nothing during the summer. By the end of it however, he had gotten back into the swing of things. Overall, he was slightly disappointed by his results, but accepted them and determined to do better. The invitational itself was quite a mess at SSA involving many incidents. While taking the Solar System test, a then rowdy sixth grader, was screaming around and being a general idiot. Later on, it was also revealed that an unidentified individual (99% sure it was Henry), had attempted to flush his pizza down a toilet. Yeah, the B team is a mess. Those people were all on it.

Kenston Invitational

Although Bird was not able to attend this invitational due to his presence being in Abu Dhabi, he still tried to help a bit. On the participation roster, he had noticed some alarming individuals. A certain Henry (the same one mentioned above) was doing Codebusters to replace Bird's absence, and the unexperienced Emily was also drafted into the event. Due to Henry's affiliation with trouble, Bird decided to call an emergency Codebusters meeting before the event started. In the meeting, Henry mentioned that he could do Affine ciphers. Not trusting him, Bird made him decode four letters encoded with the cipher while also giving him the key. After several minutes, Henry was not able to finish decoding it despite such a task requiring only a minute to complete. However, Codebusters was starting soon, and the team left before Bird could try to teach Henry how to do the Affine cipher. The Codebusters team placed 24th. This was not surprising at all however, due to everyone on the team being inexperienced. Upon seeing the team's test however, Bird was disappointed at the pitiable score of 690 with all of them being attributed to Summer, the only competent person on the team. Upon further investigation, it was revealed that Henry had in fact, finished an Affine cipher. However, every single letter was encrypted incorrectly.

Pitt Invitational

Bird was also not able to attend this invitational because he was still in Abu Dhabi. Originally, forty teams had signed up to participate in the invitational, but only twenty arrived. Therefore, solar system was able to place ninth despite the fact that both participants did not know what they were doing at all. One of them, Kyle (9th grade) thought that Earth had two moons (seriously, he actually said that) and was also unable to identify an image of Mars and left the answer to a question asking that blank even though his partner kept insisting that it was Mars. This partner was the other participant, Max. He was originally a sixth grader on the dreadful B team, but was put on the A team instead due to Bird's absence. Max was quite ambitious, a rare quality for sixth grader, but he was quite inexperienced and had never seen the A team truly at work, so he did not know what to do.

Mentor Invitational

This is probably Bird's favorite invitational in both seventh and eighth grade. It is located on a high-school campus, so navigation was much easier than some other invitationals. The Invitational also distributes some nice, spinning medals that are also labeled with the event and placement so that recipients can easily identify which medal they got for which event. This invitational was also his first one from his long absence in Abu Dhabi. He was slightly nervous about Fast Facts because he did not practice in Abu Dhabi and had a total of about three weeks to practice after returning. As a result, he spent much of the night before the invitational cramming in his hotel room. This would also be the last invitational for the B team, so Bird asked Mrs. Maxwell, his illustrious coach, to allow Max to participate on the A team with him. This way, Max would be able to finally know what a competent partner did. The fact that there would be no Division B team next year from SSA also meant that this would likely be Max's final Science Olympiad experience, and Bird wanted Max to obtain an award to help him top things off. Overall, the test went well, but Max was quite sad that this would be his last experience. While waiting for the awards ceremony, Bird managed to sleep an hour despite the incessant cheering at the minigames being run on-stage, so he made up at least some of the sleep he had lost the previous night. Overall, he was quite satisfied at his placement, but he still wanted better.

University of Michigan Invitational

One of Bird's least favorite invitationals, the poor organization made many things very hectic. This also meant that he remembered it very well. The team struggled to reach Impound in-time, but was fortunately saved by a friendly passerby who offered to help drive the team's build events to impound. Bird was also drafted into Bio-Process Lab and Wheeled Vehicle during this invitational because someone was not able to go. Unfortunately, Bio-Process Lab was not run that well, and several teams hogged stations.

Quotes

"Sigh, what have you done this time, [Max]."

"Is that supposed to be a problem?"

"WHAT THE FU (censors himself midsentence)"

"Fast Facts bombed :(" Proceeds to get first

"Time to do Codebusters!"

Time to stop procrastinating on this, bye