Virtual Invite Challenges

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emjrennich
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Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by emjrennich »

Calling all competitors and tournament directors!

Obviously the 2021 Science Olympiad season looks significantly different than normal, with many invites choosing to host virtual MiniSO tournaments (often through Scilympiad). This has posed enormous challenges to competitors and invitational Directors/Supervisors alike, as everyone had to adjust very quickly to the new situation.

Because we are all trying to learn and grow together to make this year as successful as possible, use this topic to post about technical difficulties, hard-to-take virtual test formats, difficult grading scenarios, and anything else that future virtual tournaments should be aware of to improve the experience for everyone!

Please do NOT call out any specific invitationals/people/events --- This topic is meant to be purely educational, so invitationals that have not happened yet can understand some challenges they may face on tournament day.

Thanks so much everyone!
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by Galahad »

US shipping is so dang slow.
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by BennyTheJett »

Galahad wrote: January 24th, 2021, 12:43 pm US shipping is so dang slow.
yes sir! Still waiting for medals from early december :sadge:
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LittleMissNyan (April 27th, 2021, 9:29 am)
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by SOcoachB »

Hey EmJ,

One issue we've faced at a couple of tournaments: Event Supervisors that use a Google Form, or some other non-Scilympiad mechanism, to upload work should think about a couple of things:

1) Use a url shortener. Our kids are getting super-long urls, and the ES sometimes puts these urls into the Scilympiad chat box. The ES should take note that competitors cannot copy and paste from the chat box (seems to be disabled on the platform), so competitors have to re-type them. Anyone who plans to do that should make the url short and sweet, as typing these url's can be an error-prone exercise that takes a couple of minutes.

2) Consider the fact that competitors will be locked out of the test on Scilympiad when the clock runs out. When this happens, they may lose the submission information, as well as the ability to chat with the ES. A good practice might be to have the students open the submission url at the beginning of the time period.
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by knightmoves »

We've had a lot of ad-hoc submission methods (do something on paper, scan it, email to ES / upload via google form / whatever.)

These can be challenging for younger competitors, in particular. (Some middle school kids don't have phones, for example, so their best option for "scan in this diagram and email it" ends up being taking the diagram to a parent and having them do it. Which is difficult if they've got back-to-back events and the parent hasn't expected to be continuously available.)

I get that people like tests that require you to draw diagrams. I like those tests too. But doing them in a way that is fair to all competitors is enough of a challenge that it might be better to find a different way to ask that question this year.

Even worse was the test where the ES provided a PDF and expected people to print it out, fill it in, and return it. Not everyone owns a printer. Not everyone who owns a printer can print to it from the device they're using to take the test (lots of school chromebooks, for example, can't be set up to print to a home printer, because the school locks that setting down.)
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by emjrennich »

SOcoachB wrote: February 1st, 2021, 1:29 pm Hey EmJ,

One issue we've faced at a couple of tournaments: Event Supervisors that use a Google Form, or some other non-Scilympiad mechanism, to upload work should think about a couple of things:

1) Use a url shortener. Our kids are getting super-long urls, and the ES sometimes puts these urls into the Scilympiad chat box. The ES should take note that competitors cannot copy and paste from the chat box (seems to be disabled on the platform), so competitors have to re-type them. Anyone who plans to do that should make the url short and sweet, as typing these url's can be an error-prone exercise that takes a couple of minutes.

2) Consider the fact that competitors will be locked out of the test on Scilympiad when the clock runs out. When this happens, they may lose the submission information, as well as the ability to chat with the ES. A good practice might be to have the students open the submission url at the beginning of the time period.
Thanks for this reply! Prompting students to open the submission software at the start of the test is a great idea. I also didn't know that copy-pasting from the chat box was prohibited on Scilympiad, thanks for the heads up!
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by emjrennich »

knightmoves wrote: February 8th, 2021, 10:33 am We've had a lot of ad-hoc submission methods (do something on paper, scan it, email to ES / upload via google form / whatever.)

These can be challenging for younger competitors, in particular. (Some middle school kids don't have phones, for example, so their best option for "scan in this diagram and email it" ends up being taking the diagram to a parent and having them do it. Which is difficult if they've got back-to-back events and the parent hasn't expected to be continuously available.)

I get that people like tests that require you to draw diagrams. I like those tests too. But doing them in a way that is fair to all competitors is enough of a challenge that it might be better to find a different way to ask that question this year.

Even worse was the test where the ES provided a PDF and expected people to print it out, fill it in, and return it. Not everyone owns a printer. Not everyone who owns a printer can print to it from the device they're using to take the test (lots of school chromebooks, for example, can't be set up to print to a home printer, because the school locks that setting down.)
This is an excellent point about accessibility, especially for Div B events. I think many tests written by HS/college students may utilize methods of submission that they are used to with less regard for younger students' potentially limited resources. Thank you for bringing this up; it's a great thing to avoid doing in virtual competition settings!
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by MorningCoffee »

Hey! Has anyone experienced the problem of supposed to be registered for multiple events, however only one shows up on the student dashboard. The issue is that on the coaches side, it shows that I am registered for those multiple events. I don't know if anyone has experienced this before or knows a solution. Thanks!
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rfscoach (March 5th, 2021, 3:41 pm)
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by Raven »

Our school has attended 6 invitationals this year so I have some thoughts on this:

Timeslots/Common Scilympiad Problems: Scilympiad is finicky at best. To no fault of the invitational directors, sometimes Scilympiad crashes, automatically kicks competitors out of testing windows, or automatically shortens the 50 minute timer. There needs to be a tournament administrator that is constantly there to give people extra time, open up tests, or otherwise manually fix Scilympiad's problems. (Troubleshooting Zoom sessions on competition day(s) are very helpful.) From my experience, tournaments without timeslots could fix these problems with ease, compared to tournaments with timeslots that struggled to fix problems before the next timeslot started.

Note Policies: Some tournaments we attended did not clarify their digital note policies. Regardless of the note policy, make it clear on a website or in an email, anything. For accessibility, I strongly believe that binders and cheatsheets should be allowed to be used digitally. Printing is difficult in a normal year, let alone if people are stuck at home and don't own a printer. Our regional tournament forbids competitors from clicking out of the testing window but allows digital resources. They specify that you need a separate device to view your digital notes. For our competitors who don't have two computers at the ready, we'll have to print two copies of binders or somehow find them another computer.

Test Content: Some events translated well to an online format (mainly the events that don't require work shown or anything to be drawn.) Physics and chemistry events like circuit lab and chem lab, however, almost only have high-stakes questions (i.e. 12 pt questions with a numerical right answer + significant figures that takes several steps to get to). This becomes problematic when all/most of the questions on the test are like this, because then teams who sort of know what they're doing can't showcase that and end up getting everything wrong. Not every team is in it to win nationals, something I think a lot of invitational event supervisors forget. The solutions that works is just having a variety of question difficulties or providing space/requiring competitors to type in equations or work shown, solutions that are surprisingly under-used.

Keynote Speakers: The era of two hour keystone speakers should be over. It's not. I've sat through 1-2 hour keynote speakers before the awards and while I appreciate that these experts are talking to us, it ends up feeling like a webinar we never signed up for. Virtual awards ceremonies are incredibly boring (kudos to directors who lighten the mood), they don't have the same energy to them as real awards ceremonies, and they do not need keynote speakers. If tournaments would like keynote speakers, the total presentation should not be longer than 30 minutes. Keynote speakers are a vestige of awards ceremonies still waiting on graders to grade and stalling for time. That's not necessary in virtual tournaments. This is just the opinion of me and some people in my team though.

Placements: It's really nice when tournaments extend the placings they announce based on amount of teams (e.g. MIT extending to top 15).

I second SOcoachB's point about shortened URLs. I've personally had to type a long URL and it's incredibly frustrating to be spending precious minutes of competition time on something that should be hyperlinked or shortened.
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Unome (March 5th, 2021, 4:24 pm)
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Re: Virtual Invite Challenges

Post by l0lit »

Hello, for any event supervisors reading this thread, here's some stuff I noticed as a competitor and tried to do as an ES that I think have been somewhat successful (of course, some of these solutions depend on the tournament policies).

- Images and resources: Often, images are not nearly big enough in Scilympiad. Especially as a Geomapping competitor, we're looking at huge maps that cannot be condensed to 200x400 pixels. First of all, please go through the student version (accessible via the purple eye button) and copy every link into an incognito tab to ensure it works without your personal logins. As mentioned before, we've had supervisors try to fix this mid-test by pasting the link in chat, which does NOT work. We cannot copy-paste.

I haven't had the misfortune, but a lot of students work on school-locked devices that cannot access image links. This is a very very bad thing to figure out while inside the test. On my most recent test, I went with the strategy of putting all the images in a Google folder, and generated a link for each image (care should be taken to not make a link to the folder, only the image). However, I also put a random "test" image in the same folder, and put the link to it on the Start Page (what students see before starting the test). That way, they can make sure they can access the images before starting the test and troubleshoot.

I put the images in the test and their link underneath, so competitors can access the most detailed version. This counts as time out of tab so make sure the tournament is fine with that and the students are aware.

- Most Scilympiad issues: Somehow, many people still haven't seen the reference guides. Students should read the student's guide to know what to do. Supervisors should read the student's guide to tell students who haven't read it what to do, along with their own. Coaches should do the same. I am personally a fan of everyone reading all of them to have a complete understanding.

- Checking answers: No matter how foolproof you believe the fill-in-blank questions are, there will be some exception. Go through and check every single one. Using the horizontal grading tool, it can take less than a minute per question. (This is covered in the reference guides, please read!!)

- External submissions: I competed a lot in WICI, and submission problems are very very common. Make sure students have your email to email their file if necessary. Having your email in a separate information document they can open in the test is probably the most effective method, as it stays no matter what happens in Scilympiad, or can be accessed via history. Make sure the link is clickable! Copy/paste still disabled.

There's probably a lot more I don't have on the top of my head, so I may post later. Let me know what you think!
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Umaroth (March 7th, 2021, 10:38 am)
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