We are dealing with additional changes as the summer begins for teams, but one thing that doesn't need to change under quarantine is a team archive. Keeping a team archive in a google document is simple compared to the old ways. The old way was a musty binder with years of printouts, hand-written notes with ideas for questions, and anything that was material to clues in a question that could be asked. There are any number of note taking apps and shareable work documents which can serve the purpose of a team archive, and be searchable for all the users.
The notion of a team archive is separate from players keeping notebooks for themselves. Where the purpose of a notebook is to capture results, and things that a player misses, the team archive is for both hits and misses, ideas that are spawned, and just concepts that can be fleshed out not just by the writer, but by others. Where the player notebook is good for the individual, the team archive is designed to make the team better.
Now before we go further, I'm going to put one warning here: Everything I'm about to say only works if you are not required to submit multiple packets to an event for multiple teams. Once you get to that point, you can't use this method. Any questions you need for those events have to bypass the key middle part of this practice. But this method will work for anything other than that, from a school team to a trivia writing collective.
There's three different levels of writing that take place in an idealized team. There's of course the writing that gets submitted as a team packet for tournaments. But if you don't get practice in writing, building up your understanding of the craft of writing quiz questions, your packets won't get used as often. There's really three levels of writing that a team needs to cultivate. The writer can write questions for themselves to familiarize themselves with material, and to build their understanding of the craft. The writer can write questions for their team. This is how a player takes their knowledge and transfers it to their teammates. And then the best questions created by the writer, becomes what they give to the submission tournament.
Now you can't tell when you start writing how far a question will march up this staircase. You may find that you have written a real quality question you can be proud of, but it never fits the target distribution and difficulty of the tournaments your team submits to, so it sits in the middle.
Start by setting up three documents, or note boards, or whatever structure you want to use. The key needs are that you can set sharing permissions for each, and access is restricted to people in your team.
The first document is your personal archive. In here you collect all the notes about questions you want to write, links to websites for source material, and really anything that helps you learn more things. When you write questions, you write them in this document. They don't need to be fully fleshed out questions, they can be simple, rudimentary questions. Things you just want to get straight in your head so you don't miss it the next time. Anything goes in here. You're not tied to writing to a distribution or anything like that. It is a place to put creative thought down, to allow you to commit ideas to memory. And when you feel like the question you've written or a link to a reference would be useful to another member of your team, you pass it over to the second document.
That handover condition is the key here, it's not because the team needs to write a packet in a weekend, it's not because the question has been polished and edited, it's because the information will help someone else on the team to be a better player.
The second document is the team archive. You only have access to your personal archive, but the team archive is shared with all the team members, and any team member can access and modify this document. Each team member has a section of the document with their name on it, and their questions go there. There should also be a section for any links to sources that you have found useful. Over time as the team archive fills, these become questions you can use in practice, or review to see how they can be edited to improve them. The team edits the questions so they become more refined and polished. As this archive fills, and becomes material unique to your team's training, you build up a supply of questions that your team can use to supply new packets for events.
The third document(s) are the packet archive, which is also shared by all team members. The packet archive begins with a distribution you will need to fill for a future event. Once questions have been polished in the team archive, they are checked against the remaining needs of the packet distribution. If the question matches, it is cut from the team archive and added to the packet archive's incomplete file. As we find matching questions in the team archive, we cut and paste them into the packet archive file. Once we have that filled packet with all its required questions, we can submit that packet to a submission tournament, or whatever you need that packet for.
Now there may be needs that develop where you will have to rush a question from thought to the currently filling packet, but this gets rid of two of the main tensions of question writing, working from a fixed distribution in a tight time frame, and finding time to develop your writing skill.
Please note I have no illusions that the questions at the end of these newsletters constitute great art. They're the product of being able to take from my personal archive, and share them without worrying about all the expectations that morph into hangups and make it difficulty to write.
Stuff to listen to
Gated Reverb, the sound of the '80s
Stuff to Look at
The Articles I Learned from This Week
When I got to reading about the items below, this description of the first use of various symbols in calculus caught my eye.
The Articles You Could Learn from This Week
I may or may not agree with the conclusions of some of these articles, but the historical background of the material they use is worth examining for question material. Two examples: Here's an article on modern Iran with 40 years of background, and an article on the Electoral College, with 220 years of background.
This article combines the Tambora eruption with the Villa Diodati.
And this article covers the Mount Saint Helens eruption, which was forty years ago this month
Didn’t You Learn Anything From the Last Time?
1
When it is combined in a cross product with a vector field, it yields the curl function.
A. Name vector differential operator drawn as an upside-down triangle.
answer: del or nabla
B. When applied to a scalar variable del yields this function which shows the direction and rate of greatest change in the scalar field.
answer: gradient
C. Taking the Jacobian of the gradient yields this matrix function consisting of the second partial derivatives of the scalar field.
answer: Hessian
2
After his second novel, Fountain City, spun out of control to over 1500 pages, he scrapped the novel.
A. Name this author who recovered from that experience to write novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
answer: Michael Chabon
B. From the ashes of the Fountain City debacle, Chabon created a novel about Grady Tripp, a writer whose second novel had expanded to over 2000 pages.
answer: Wonder Boys
C. The first four chapters of Fountain City were published in the quarterly literary journal of this publishing house founded by Dave Eggers. Other products of this non-profit are a daily humor website, called its "Internet Tendency."
answer: McSweeney's Publishing
3
Name these poets buried in Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery
A. This member of the Imagist movement from a famous family was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously for her collection What's O' Clock.
answer: Amy Lowell
B. This author of the "Breakfast-Table" series had popularized the term anesthesia during his time as a professor at Harvard Medical School.
answer: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
C. Scholars theorize the posthumously published translation of the poetry of Michelangelo to be infused with autobiographical intent. Late in his career he was given an armchair made from the spreading chestnut tree found in his "The Village Blacksmith."
answer: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
4
The cause of his death was reported as "hemorrhoidal colic," which afterward became an euphemism for assassination.
A. Name this tsar of Russia, who succeeded his aunt Elizabeth, before ruling only for six months.
answer: Peter III or Karl Peter Ulrich
B. After being overthrown by this woman, his wife, he cried “Didn’t I tell you she was capable of anything?”
answer: Catherine the Great or Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst
C. Two members of this family arrested Peter and forced him to sign his abdication letter. Grigory of this family led the coup against Peter and installed Catherine, and likely fathered her son Paul.
answer: Orlov
5
When an atom of this element is connected to three functional groups, the resulting compound is a tertiary amine.
A. Name this lightest of the group 15 elements
answer: nitrogen
B. This class of organic compounds consisting of three bonded nitrogen atoms is highly unstable when physically shocked, making it ideal for filling air bags.
answer: azides
C. Acrylic fabrics are examples of this class of compounds which have a functional group of a nitrogen triple bonded to a carbon.
answer: nitriles