Northern California 2016

kdy16Dad
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by kdy16Dad »

I am a Kennedy parent coach. One of the events that brought us down was Scrambler B. We were placed at 22nd at the tournament. Here is the video of our scoring run. We thought we had done better than 22nd and other spectators around us thought so too. Could those of you who attended the tournament tell us whether 22nd looks about right or not based on the video?
SOPomo
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by SOPomo »

kdy16Dad wrote:I am a Kennedy parent coach. One of the events that brought us down was Scrambler B. We were placed at 22nd at the tournament. Here is the video of our scoring run. We thought we had done better than 22nd and other spectators around us thought so too. Could those of you who attended the tournament tell us whether 22nd looks about right or not based on the video?
Was there a tiered issue with it perhaps? That seems pretty close to be 22nd place.
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by chalker »

kdy16Dad wrote:I am a Kennedy parent coach. One of the events that brought us down was Scrambler B. We were placed at 22nd at the tournament. Here is the video of our scoring run. We thought we had done better than 22nd and other spectators around us thought so too. Could those of you who attended the tournament tell us whether 22nd looks about right or not based on the video?
Based purely upon the video, I'd make the following estimates:
-Run time = ~4 secs (based upon the timestamps in the video)
-Distance score = ~40 cms (based upon the fact the terminal barrier is at least 25cm tall)

This would result in run score of 80. At the Ohio State Tournament 2 weekends ago, this would have gotten you somewhere in the 19th place range. Hence, 22nd place at a tournament doesn't seem to be out whack with what is possible.

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kdy16Dad
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by kdy16Dad »

There is no tiering in Scrambler this year, so that is not the reason. As it so happens, there was a violation (of rule 4.f) on the first run, when the kids left an aiming device on the track and forgot to remove it before the run. The ES told them about it after the first run. They removed it for the second run. Since the Competition violation is run specific, there was no violation in the second run. If there was, it was not communicated to the kids. You can do sample scoring using the spreadsheet from soinc and you can see that a Competition violation carries a 1000 penalty, but it is run specific. They are supposed to take the best run among the two.
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by kdy16Dad »

Chalker,

I agree with your scoring estimate. But there was actually a parent of a medal winning team who watched the entire Scrambler tournament and all the runs who informed me that he estimated our position to be around 7 - 10. I agree with him, but I am biased, and I did not watch all the runs. But if there are other competitors who scored between 7 - 21 who can chime in on this, we can get a better idea.
kdy16Dad
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by kdy16Dad »

I had not told you about the earlier Scrambler problems and only talked about our position in the rankings.

At the time of impound, the ES told us that we needed to not only detach the weight for weighing, but also remove the string from the rest of the launcher as long as it was "part of the falling mass". But this is not correct. Rule 2.c states that, "Any part of the Scrambler whose gravitational potential energy decreases and provides energy to propel the ETV is considered to be part of the falling mass."  This means that if a length of string is counterbalanced by an equal or longer string on the other side of the pulley from which the weight falls, the string does not provide energy to propel the ETV. In most scrambler launchers we have seen, the length of string from the pulley down to the weight when the weight is all the way down is much shorter than the rest of the string that attaches to the ETV and pulls it forward. So the string should not be required to be untied. We were never required to remove the string in the previous invitational, state or regional tournaments. We were only required to detach the weight for impound, which we were ready to do.

Since we have the only spring launcher we saw in the tournament, undoing the string linkages meant disassembling part of our launcher set up. This messed up all our calibrations since the strings were tied and calibrated to give the maximum velocity for the ETV. Having to undo linkages destroyed the correct strings tensions that were fine tuned during practice.

Here is a video from Wicklund invitational in Feb that shows the gold medal winning run from our scrambler. Here is another video from our Regional tournament in March that showed our gold medal winning run. If you notice, you can see the timing proctors running to keep up with the vehicle. The fast pace is the normal pace of our vehicle. In contrast at our State run on Saturday, they were just walking along. This is because their insistence on undoing the linkages destroyed the finely tuned setup we had. The slow pace also reduced the distance the scrambler traveled since our braking mechanism is tuned for the normal pace. If it is slow, it brakes very early and stops short.

To make matters worse, we were not allowed time to retie the linkages and reassemble the launcher. Our 8 minute clock began the moment we got to the impound area. We filed an appeal about this impound mess-up right after the event but before the scoring was done, but its resolution was not communicated to us.
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by soyuppy »

Kennedy wasn't as lucky as Solon. Solon manage to bomb WIDI placing in the 30s, yet still eek out first place overall. Looking at Kennedy's score, Road Scholar and Scrambler are the 2 events that may have cause the the 1 place score. RS earn 17th place...not very Kennedy like.
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by kdy16Dad »

They only had two maps for RS and all 28 teams had to take turns to look at them. In the meantime, they had to wait and lose time. Churchill also did not do well, presumably for the same reason.
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Re: Northern California 2016

Post by soyuppy »

kdy16Dad wrote:They only had two maps for RS and all 28 teams had to take turns to look at them. In the meantime, they had to wait and lose time. Churchill also did not do well, presumably for the same reason.
Another event that the fate of your performance lies in the hand of supervisor. 2 maps sharing and taking turn among 28 teams? That explain why there were no big tables in the room to allow maps to be spread across table.
Again, its the rule. Per RS, there's no mentioning of anything relating to the room with adequate area to look at the map or supervisor providing individual map. Perhaps that also need to be consider in the future RS event.
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