2020 Princeton Invitational

[pepperonipi]

Data Science (?, not placing): Lol... I. got put into this event on Friday evening so my partner and I obv didn't study much before,

Wow, sounds like your coach needs to do a better job prepping the team for trial events.

Yeah honestly I’m not sure how my coaches make decisions sometimes

[JonB]

Data Science (?, not placing): Lol... I. got put into this event on Friday evening so my partner and I obv didn't study much before,

Wow, sounds like your coach needs to do a better job prepping the team for trial events.

Yeah honestly I’m not sure how my coaches make decisions sometimes

A 15-sided dice works well.

[jaggie34]

Wow, sounds like your coach needs to do a better job prepping the team for trial events.

Yeah honestly I’m not sure how my coaches make decisions sometimes

A 15-sided dice works well.

I thought you had a big wheel with all our faces on it?

[pepperonipi]

Yeah honestly I’m not sure how my coaches make decisions sometimes

A 15-sided dice works well.

I thought you had a big wheel with all our faces on it?

Woah guys, should we really be revealing Boca’s secrets in a public forum thread?

[builderguy135]

I believe our time was just below 3 minutes, but I don't know the exact time.

Jeeeez that's good.

was the timed particularly long/difficult?

Yeah, it took a lot of time to fill in.

[windu34]

Circuit Lab - Event Supervisor Review
Overall, the event went well and Miles (volunteer from MIT SciOly) and I were able to keep grading on time despite not having any other volunteers.
Test: Scores were good overall and had a fairly linear trend (other than the outlier in 1st place) and mirrored what I saw on the Solon test. I suspect the Boca circuit team has been studying my exams more than other teams that competed - the major commonalities between my exams are the circuit analysis / op-amp problems and the basic skills being tested on the labs. Based on seeing their exam after grading, investing time into practicing nodal/mesh analysis with a wide variety of problems and getting lots of hands-on experience with working with breadboards and lab components can be key to scoring well. Generally, the length of the test seemed a little too long for this competition, and I probably could have had a better distribution with a shorter test. I was interested to see some teams solving the op-amp problems easily, but struggling on the circuit analysis. Both types of problems test similar skills, so I suspect the op-amp analysis problems must have been easier than the circuit analysis (which I admit the Thevenin equivalent problem wasn't the easiest). Teams did better on the electromagnetism-type problems than I usually see. I was surprised by the lack of attempts on the electrical control problem - the format was different than Solon and I think teams like the Solon format of electrical control better than the one on this exam.
Labs: The labs went well with a lot more teams attempting them than I have seen at some other competitions. Lab 1 was intended to not be difficult for teams and to test basic circuit knowledge and problem solving. I had some issues with the question wording not properly reflecting the intention of the lab and probably just needed to play around with the lab components more before writing the questions. Teams generally scored well on Lab 1 (it was fairly easy in my opinion) with a lot of teams earning 1/2 to 2/3 of the points for Lab 1. Lab 2 was a different story - lots of teams got the truth table correct and 1/3 got most of the logic diagram correct, but few teams got a majority of the points for the circuit diagram. The intention of the circuit diagram was to reward teams that are familiar with breadboards and real components and try to give them as many points as possible for simply drawing the circuit diagram if the constructed circuit on the breadboard. Looking back, I think this problem should have been worth more points (perhaps 30-35 instead of 24) since the circuit was fairly "large" and spanned most of the breadboard. As always, the use of breadboards and mini power supplies in each lab box worked really well and I intend to continue using this setup. I will plan to write an ES document for running the lab portion of this event (with pictures) since I think it is fairly optimal and could help a lot of ESes in future years.
Tournament Review: I always enjoy supervising at Princeton and this (3rd) year was no different. It has been great watching the tournament and club grow over the 3 years I have ESed for it now and I would be happy to return in future years. The planning team does a great job with ensuring us out-of-state ESes have everything we need during our visit and I always enjoy meeting the new eboard members and hanging out with the other supervisors, many of whom I have become good friends with over the years.

As always, the exam and key will be posted on Asher's website.

Graph_Scores.PNG (14.56 KiB) Viewed 3160 times

[shrewdPanther46]

Anyone have an idea of when we can expect full results?

[jaggie34]

https://app.avogadro.ws/invitational/princeton-c/

[Lorant]

Anybody know the wright stuff top flight times?

[CookiePie1]

Here's my review of PUSO 2020:
Ping Pong Parachute (3) - The event was fairly well run. The ES was pretty chill. However, there was a pretty long delay between when the rocket was pressurized to when it was launched. With the Nerds inc launcher this wasn't an issue as there weren't any leaks. As jaggie mentioned, there were some updrafts but overall i was pretty satisfied as the room had a nice high celing. (8.5/10)

Protein Modeling (5) - The jmol section was interesting, and the questions weren't too easy. Maybe this belongs in the protein thread but the DSSP report and the actual visualization environment had a discrepancy regarding the number of 3₁₀ helices, so I wasn't entirely sure which answer to put down. Other than that the test was very well written and wasn't too long or too short. (9/10)

Sounds of Music (2) - My partner was the one doing the device testing, and she said it was pretty normal. As for the written test, it was fairly well written. However, the section at the end with all the crazy math stuff and that one calculus question were kinda crazy and it was kinda out of our league. Besides the math section, we finished the test within the block and didn't really struggle time-wise. (9.5/10)

Wright Stuff (14) - It was pretty well run; the ES was very nice. I appreciated that she really asked us a lot of questions regarding our plane, which helps to verify that the teams built it themselves. imo a lot of supervisors don't ask enough "knowledge of the device" questions. As for the room, it had a nice tall ceiling but the area posed a challenge to make the planes fly in a smaller circle. This room would have been amazing for ppp but it was great for wright stuff. Our plane did kinda trash this time but overall it was run extremely well. (10/10)

Overall (11) - Amazing tournament as usual. The ESs were awesome and I had a great time. I was also pleasantly surprised that awards didn't start terribly late and that they took pictures for all the medalists. Can't wait to come back next year! (11/10)

On a completely unrelated note, I can't measure the extent to which I cringed when the audience started clapping in the middle of the a cappela group's performance. But the acoustics of the chapel were amazing and the group sounded really nice.