Game On C

[Magikarpmaster629]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

[Unome]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

On the subject of MIT, I would like to note that they used a Nationals game type even though MIT had explicitly stated that the tournament would be following regionals rules.

[antoine_ego]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

On the subject of MIT, I would like to note that they used a Nationals game type even though MIT had explicitly stated that the tournament would be following regionals rules.

They also used Nationals standards for Mousetrap.

[terence.tan]

What are themes and what are the possible themes?

themes can literally be anything even remotely related to science

themes I have encountered are:

mechanical springs (MIT 2016)
dinosaurs (Yale 2016)
hide and seek (MA States 2016) [this one is pretty garbage]
light (Nats 2016)
enzymes (Nats 2017)

so, almost anything. Game On is one of those events where you have to know a little bit about every field in order to do well

more themes
electricity (Islip 2017)
Forest fire (regionals 2017)
cell division (NY State 2017)
Farm (Islip 2018)

[knottingpurple]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

On the subject of MIT, I would like to note that they used a Nationals game type even though MIT had explicitly stated that the tournament would be following regionals rules.

They also used Nationals standards for Mousetrap.

I got put in this event for Yale only quite recently but I practiced the 3 regional level game types and because the rules said they'd be the types used at invites and it seemed maybe doable, if there are other types at invites I'm really not going to manage this event...

[poonicle]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

Honestly, I was quite confused by some of the grading... Did the ES use https://www.soinc.org/sites/default/fil ... lained.pdf to grade? As an example of something that confused my partner and me when we got our rubrics back, the linked rubric awards 1 point for having a default starting position of sprite under "sprite orientation," but we got 0 points for that part.

As for the "racing" game, I believe the confusion was in the "two-player" portion. Most competitors assumed that two-player meant player vs. player, not 2 players vs. an autonomous sprite (this is the sense that I got from our school's B team)

[Riptide]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

Honestly, I was quite confused by some of the grading... Did the ES use https://www.soinc.org/sites/default/fil ... lained.pdf to grade? As an example of something that confused my partner and me when we got our rubrics back, the linked rubric awards 1 point for having a default starting position of sprite under "sprite orientation," but we got 0 points for that part.

As for the "racing" game, I believe the confusion was in the "two-player" portion. Most competitors assumed that two-player meant player vs. player, not 2 players vs. an autonomous sprite (this is the sense that I got from our school's B team)

I hadn't even considered that a 2 player racing game could imply 2 players vs an autonomous sprite. That is very interesting and may be the reason for the large number of tiers. I doubt any team was prepared for creating a 2 player racing game however, since it is a National level game type as Unome said, and so most people (including me lol) probably just went with the first thing that came to mind which was most likely a player vs player race.

[Magikarpmaster629]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

Honestly, I was quite confused by some of the grading... Did the ES use https://www.soinc.org/sites/default/fil ... lained.pdf to grade? As an example of something that confused my partner and me when we got our rubrics back, the linked rubric awards 1 point for having a default starting position of sprite under "sprite orientation," but we got 0 points for that part.

As for the "racing" game, I believe the confusion was in the "two-player" portion. Most competitors assumed that two-player meant player vs. player, not 2 players vs. an autonomous sprite (this is the sense that I got from our school's B team)

So we had around 10 people grading tests at one point, and I was the main grader. There wasn't enough time to properly teach them how to grade, but I believe they were all using the rubric. If I was grading your test I would have given you one point for using any sort of orientation at all (e.g. one team had just a flag sprite with no sense of orientation, so they got a zero for that) and I would have given you a second if the orientation changed during the game while still functioning well (iirc I gave the AB b-team two points for orientation but I'm not sure).

You are correct on the bit on racing. It was a bit misleading that it was included with the two player, but as with the other topics they're meant to be single player in the first place, with two player being an additional topic so they must have both.

Some other things/advice from helping run the event:

-The highest score was Troy A's with a score in the 80's (I'm hesitant to say exactly). From what I remember, all untiered teams still had very high scores and would have been ranked pretty high if not as high as they were if we did not take tiers into account.
-A lot of teams missed points simply for not including simple things. If they put in any sounds at all, even if it's just a single button click we gave one point on the sounds section. Even if it's much uglier, a custom sprite automatically gets two points while a stock sprite is limited to one.
-The ES told me she chose the theme to be as broad as possible so we wouldn't be playing the same games while grading. In the end, there were probably around 45-55 recycling games, with most of the rest being 'energy' related. Only one stood out to me, and that was Troy B's conservation of quantum color. I know there are only four available points for creativity, but when you've been grading for eight hours and come across the 10th Recycle Rush in a row, you're certainly more likely to dock points for things that might not otherwise be counted off for. Think outside the box a little!
-We're really sorry for how poorly the event was run in especially the first two time slots. This event was disaster after disaster after disaster, from the door being locked to only having one computer able to log in at a time to not being able to download Scratch to grading half an hour into awards. It makes me curious as to how many events typically go bad at tournaments that I couldn't tell as a competitor...

Feel free to reply to this or send me a PM with other questions/concerns/etc. If anyone wants their game back I believe you can contact the ES for that, but if her contact info is not available to you then send me a PM.

[Riptide]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

Honestly, I was quite confused by some of the grading... Did the ES use https://www.soinc.org/sites/default/fil ... lained.pdf to grade? As an example of something that confused my partner and me when we got our rubrics back, the linked rubric awards 1 point for having a default starting position of sprite under "sprite orientation," but we got 0 points for that part.

As for the "racing" game, I believe the confusion was in the "two-player" portion. Most competitors assumed that two-player meant player vs. player, not 2 players vs. an autonomous sprite (this is the sense that I got from our school's B team)

So we had around 10 people grading tests at one point, and I was the main grader. There wasn't enough time to properly teach them how to grade, but I believe they were all using the rubric. If I was grading your test I would have given you one point for using any sort of orientation at all (e.g. one team had just a flag sprite with no sense of orientation, so they got a zero for that) and I would have given you a second if the orientation changed during the game while still functioning well (iirc I gave the AB b-team two points for orientation but I'm not sure).

You are correct on the bit on racing. It was a bit misleading that it was included with the two player, but as with the other topics they're meant to be single player in the first place, with two player being an additional topic so they must have both.

Some other things/advice from helping run the event:

-The highest score was Troy A's with a score in the 80's (I'm hesitant to say exactly). From what I remember, all untiered teams still had very high scores and would have been ranked pretty high if not as high as they were if we did not take tiers into account.
-A lot of teams missed points simply for not including simple things. If they put in any sounds at all, even if it's just a single button click we gave one point on the sounds section. Even if it's much uglier, a custom sprite automatically gets two points while a stock sprite is limited to one.
-The ES told me she chose the theme to be as broad as possible so we wouldn't be playing the same games while grading. In the end, there were probably around 45-55 recycling games, with most of the rest being 'energy' related. Only one stood out to me, and that was Troy B's conservation of quantum color. I know there are only four available points for creativity, but when you've been grading for eight hours and come across the 10th Recycle Rush in a row, you're certainly more likely to dock points for things that might not otherwise be counted off for. Think outside the box a little!
-We're really sorry for how poorly the event was run in especially the first two time slots. This event was disaster after disaster after disaster, from the door being locked to only having one computer able to log in at a time to not being able to download Scratch to grading half an hour into awards. It makes me curious as to how many events typically go bad at tournaments that I couldn't tell as a competitor...

Feel free to reply to this or send me a PM with other questions/concerns/etc. If anyone wants their game back I believe you can contact the ES for that, but if her contact info is not available to you then send me a PM.

Honestly, the main problem for me was just the computers itself. They were lagging just way too much for me and partner to finish our game in time - especially since the game that we were trying to make was actually pretty intensive and caused the computer to lag to the point where it was almost unusable. As for the grading time, I can't even imagine how you guys finished. It took us around 4 hours just to grade 24 teams. Props to you guys for getting it done.

[technoal9]

I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.

Honestly, I was quite confused by some of the grading... Did the ES use https://www.soinc.org/sites/default/fil ... lained.pdf to grade? As an example of something that confused my partner and me when we got our rubrics back, the linked rubric awards 1 point for having a default starting position of sprite under "sprite orientation," but we got 0 points for that part.

As for the "racing" game, I believe the confusion was in the "two-player" portion. Most competitors assumed that two-player meant player vs. player, not 2 players vs. an autonomous sprite (this is the sense that I got from our school's B team)

So we had around 10 people grading tests at one point, and I was the main grader. There wasn't enough time to properly teach them how to grade, but I believe they were all using the rubric. If I was grading your test I would have given you one point for using any sort of orientation at all (e.g. one team had just a flag sprite with no sense of orientation, so they got a zero for that) and I would have given you a second if the orientation changed during the game while still functioning well (iirc I gave the AB b-team two points for orientation but I'm not sure).

You are correct on the bit on racing. It was a bit misleading that it was included with the two player, but as with the other topics they're meant to be single player in the first place, with two player being an additional topic so they must have both.

Some other things/advice from helping run the event:

-The highest score was Troy A's with a score in the 80's (I'm hesitant to say exactly). From what I remember, all untiered teams still had very high scores and would have been ranked pretty high if not as high as they were if we did not take tiers into account.
-A lot of teams missed points simply for not including simple things. If they put in any sounds at all, even if it's just a single button click we gave one point on the sounds section. Even if it's much uglier, a custom sprite automatically gets two points while a stock sprite is limited to one.
-The ES told me she chose the theme to be as broad as possible so we wouldn't be playing the same games while grading. In the end, there were probably around 45-55 recycling games, with most of the rest being 'energy' related. Only one stood out to me, and that was Troy B's conservation of quantum color. I know there are only four available points for creativity, but when you've been grading for eight hours and come across the 10th Recycle Rush in a row, you're certainly more likely to dock points for things that might not otherwise be counted off for. Think outside the box a little!
-We're really sorry for how poorly the event was run in especially the first two time slots. This event was disaster after disaster after disaster, from the door being locked to only having one computer able to log in at a time to not being able to download Scratch to grading half an hour into awards. It makes me curious as to how many events typically go bad at tournaments that I couldn't tell as a competitor...

Feel free to reply to this or send me a PM with other questions/concerns/etc. If anyone wants their game back I believe you can contact the ES for that, but if her contact info is not available to you then send me a PM.

I was on Acton-Bxborough B and we got tiered. The other AB team placed 4th place with the use of an autonomous sprite + 2 players and scored a 52.5. Our side scored 60 points and got 20th place. The only reason the other AB team didn't get tiered was because they asked the ES about what was necessary which saved them from being tiered. The event rules weren't clear about what was necessary for a 2 person racing game, and the computer issues were very troubling. All of 1st block was rescheduled with only 35 minutes to complete the game because they lost all the saves and even when we came back to retake the computer issues were still troubling. The lag was very bad and at times our scratch window was frozen for minutes at a time. The grading was also troubling for both of our teams. They got docked points for not having a title and buttons, when both were clearly present, and we got docked for not having environmental interaction when the environment of our game was a functional maze, as well as not stating the objective of the game in which there was a whole screen dedicated to it. In general I think the event definitely could have been run clearer with more transparency to certain rules, as well as better setup.