Week 113: Online Questions and You
"Where do you see national tournaments evolving next?
The bounds on growth for a tournament are still teams, costs (travel, lodging, tournament), time at event, questions, buildings, staff, buzzers, and clocks. Everything is currently a tradeoff between these pieces. The next evolutionary step is going to have to be technological, something that can increase one of these without a tradeoff."
-- Me, in my 20for20 interview.
When I said that five years ago, I thought the path forward was going to be more teams, which would allow more tournaments closer together, and more people being involved, and I thought that the tradeoff would be the crash of time at events, travel costs, and cost of buzzers. I hadn't figured that the cost of questions specifically their distribution to the staff of tournaments would be the big technological leap, but after the beta testing of the Online Question System, I'm thinking this is where the growth will be facilitated in the next couple years.
I've now had four tournaments with NAQT's Online Question System and I think I'm now comfortable enough with it to offer some advice while using it. I'll freely admit it took me a little while to get used to the new system. I felt myself being slow on the laptop in the past three events, losing a second or two on each cycle as I moved to the next tossup. This weekend's Middle School National Championship was where I finally got the hang of it.
If you’re going to be using the Online Question System, the first two things I'm going to suggest you do is to treat your screen like it's a teleprompter, and make it as visible as possible for you from as far away as possible. This is not so much (solely) an old-man move as much as something to allow you to lean back from the screen. If you're hunched over the screen, you're broadcasting your voice as a reader into the screen, which defeats the purpose of moderating. Just one ctrl-+ larger on the screen lets you use the entire width of the window to read the question.
Going full screen permits an additional couple of improvements. Even on a 15" laptop screen, the way that the OQS works is to put the event and the cycle of the question in large print, then the game score, then the tossup and bonus. If you enlarge the text to get it across the screen, you end up with the last line of the tossup right about at the bottom of the screen, exactly the wrong place for a quick buzz, and the wrong place for you to read the entire question without moving the screen around. Going to fullscreen mode in the browser helps that.
The scorekeeper can't really do fullscreen for the methods we had during the *CT's. Because the scorekeeper recorded protests, scores on every question, and had to follow the action on the Slack channels while the game was going on, full screen isn't really possible unless the scorekeeper knew the next-tab and last-tab commands on their browser. (This is really good advice for anyone, learning a couple of fast switch keystrokes can make you much more productive at any time.)
The Online Question System's font is a little different that what you're probably used to, and as sans-serif font, it makes some unexpected confusions happen. We're used to Palatino and Times Roman as fonts used for questions, and there's visual glitches that happen with those that aren't as present with sans-serif, you don't see "rn" and "m" confused by readers as much with sans-serif for example. But not having the width on the letter I makes things a little tougher on things like Roman numerals, and especially the underlining on I by itself. There was a question on a monarch, first of the name, where the I was not necessary to the answer but because the I looked a little like it was underlined, several moderators forced an unnecessary prompt.
So is this the future of quiz bowl?
I’d say an emphatic "partially." I can probably state that NAQT's championships are going to employ this for the forseeable future. Having seen the amount of paperwork required for a national championship tournament go from a couple thousand to a couple hundred, I can call that alone a remarkable logistical win. (Since most of those sheets were scoresheets printed for the possible emergency of system failure, and weren't used, those sheets will just be transported to the next event, meaning even less paper printed for next time.) It is designed to work for in-person or online tournaments, and doesn't require any more advanced technology than a web browser to distribute questions to readers.
This permits a lot of things that couldn't be done reliably with any prior system. In two instances questions were rewritten on the fly to reflect changing world events taking place just hours earlier. More shockingly, protest decisions could be not only relayed to rooms in real time, but questions could be updated as soon as the protest decision came from headquarters, meaning only there were situations where only the first room to encounter a question had an issue with a protest, and the other rooms never saw a problem, as the question was edited to fix the protest before it was read in those rooms.
But before this can be used for anyone, there's going to have to be some modularity, some features that aren't needed for every event. Some of the really neat things that were done with this are simply impractical when expanded out. I don't forsee that every tournament will need or be able to have edits on the fly spurred from an automatic protest system, nor will tournaments be able to have someone on call to fix common problems. I also don't know if having to interface with Slack is a deal-breaker for other people who learned the ins and outs of Zoom or Discord the past two years. But if the questions asked during the tournaments is any indication, there's going to be a high demand for this as a service all through next year. It's survived the alpha tests in Minnesota, and the beta tests of these championships. With some work, I would hope this is releasable software that will make tournament management much easier. That’s where the partially comes in, I think there’s going to be a certain reservation about letting this out into the wild until every bug has been caught and every feature improved. How big that backlog gets will delay the release, but will improve the user experience when it’s made more widely available.
There's also some things for championships which aren't implemented yet, which will be priorities for NAQT and no one else. For example, I was assigned third official duties for the playoff games of the MSNCT, and while I know what to do with this role when I have the paper copies of the packets in front of me, there's a completely different set of duties which are necessary but not currently possible in the OQS. Previously, a third official watched both teams, made sure answers were correct, helped decide if there was a question about an answer, monitored the recording, and let HQ know if there was a potential issue coming that wasn't yet protested. As of writing this, there's a bug report that the third official can't log in and see the questions in the same way as the moderator and scorekeeper. I managed to see it via NAQT's admin site, but that limits third officials to those with NAQT admin permissions. This would be nice to have for HSNCT, but it's more likely to be developed for the 2023 events.
It will also have to work a little faster and have a little easier learning curve. I would like to think of myself as a fast learner of technology and a fast reader of quiz bowl questions, but I’m still getting used to the controls, and I am not smooth at it yet. If after four tournaments in five weeks, I’m not smooth with it, how can we expect someone facing it for the first time to be smooth with it? While there’s a tutorial, to really revolutionize and expand the number of moderators available, this has to be something that doesn’t require a tutorial, or days of use to get to peak proficiency. When we get there, the real expansion begins.
Between the pandemic and technological advances, we've been forced to rework a lot of the items I listed for quiz bowl's evolution. Tournament costs, travel, distributing questions to moderators, and buzzers have all been streamlined in the past couple years, sometimes out of innovation, sometimes out of survival. This is going to be new tool for tournaments from leagues to championships, and it's going to permit growth of the circuit on all levels.