To be honest, the test section is what most teams struggle with, as most nationally competitive teams manage to get around 45+ points on the device, thus making that portion of the event sort of irrelevant. Other than that, the best way to improve your binder is to take tests. This is how I practiced and made my binder last year. By taking tests, not only can you see what is missing from your binder, but you can see the general trends that appear for topics on tests. Now that there are actually defined topics on the rules, this process should be much easier. Another recommendation for the binder is looking at the Wikipedia pages for major topics, such as "Clocks," "Calendars," "Time," etc. Although you can technically just print these out and stick them in your binder, it would be a lot more beneficial if you actually spent the time to read through these articles and understand them. However, this is not to deemphasize the importance of the binder: you have one, use it! As a proctor, I've seen way too many teams struggle in this event as they didn't even prepare a binder. You can also go through all of the hyperlinks and related links on the articles in order to get as much information about the various topics as well. In general, I'd say that HyperPhysics and Wikipedia are the two most helpful online resources for this event, and that taking tests is the most valuable experience overall. The forum in fact has a lot of these tests that can be used, as well as helpful resources that I in fact used as my binder when I was first starting out in this event.TrueshotBarrage wrote:Thanks for the replies on the idea of implementing an escapement. We thought about it for a while but decided against it (we would have needed to redesign an entirely new clock). However, the information from these threads in general helped tons and I am happy to say we got 1st at our regionals with our trials being only 1.4 seconds off combined (2nd trial was exact).
Now that we are headed to state, I have some new time and questions. Even though our trials were pretty sound, the test portion was discouraging. We found our Achilles tendon was the trivia, considering more than 60% of the questions consisted of knowing random facts (some not even about time). Is there a good way to study for these types of questions? We did our reading on the wiki/Wikipedia/etc but generally these are formulae, how things work, etc. and not usually stuff like when the theory of relativity was publicized.
Another problem we noticed was variance of the period of our pendulum, which meant that our pendulum's length (from the pivot to the mass) was not constant. Any suggestions would be awesome.
We trigger our device by holding the pendulum at a certain angle then releasing it when the time starts. Obviously this is not always accurate and is prone to human errors. Anyone have good ideas for a triggering mechanism?
Thanks anyone in advance.
As for the device, rather than just going with the equation T = 2pi*sqrt(L/g) for our pendulum, we took data for each individual swing, resulting in large data tables that had the time values in relation to swing. By running countless trials of data collection, we were able to get an extremely accurate device (0.1 seconds off on 4/5 trials, perfect on one trial at the nationals tournament), and this way you can avoid doing any calculations. There will also be variance in the period of your pendulum as it does not follow perfect simple harmonic motion, but loses energy over time, as well as can have 3-D motion (making ovals with its path) rather than 2-D. For the trigger mechanism, having some sort of built-in location (such as a bar) to keep the starting position constant can help a lot.
