Week 140: Second Practice reviewed
And a note on cool experiments.
[Shorter one this week, composed mostly of my notes to the team in the second practice. As a setup, as they left the first practice, I asked them to watch an episode of the local high school program, and an episode of Jeopardy! My intention was to compare a couple of questions from each that covered similar ground. I forgot that this was the Tournament of Champions, so my goal with this was slightly thwarted, but I think I recovered nicely from that. I introduced them to charting to figure things out, but only covered one aspect of it. At this point this is a remix of several sections of the book and things written here, just for an audience that will hit a circuit event before they play on television.]
Now what I do with the Hometown Hi-Q episodes is chart them out. I take each team's answers and see how the writers have written each question. I took the two shows they aired this past weekend, and charted them out. The copies [were going to be here until I realized I scanned them in as PDFs, and I left my papers at the office. Apologies.]
I want you to see that every team got at least one question that related to chemical elements, either you had to work out an element from the options presented, you had to work out the element from the symbol, or you had to work out the element from the atomic number.
I want you to see that every team got at least one question on a President of the United States, and if you watched, you saw all of those questions included the clue of what number president they were. This is something that Hometown Hi-Q does, but quiz bowl away from television doesn't do.
I want you to note the sheer number of books and authors questions there were.
And I want you to note the sheer number of times they asked about a country and gave either its capital, its largest city, or both.
All of these are ways to give a simple, short, and uniquely identifying clue at the end of the question. They love to give these types of detail as last clues.
Now I also want you to think about the Jeopardy! episodes I wanted you to look at. While they didn't use those same clues, did they use those same answers: Presidents, Chemical Elements, Authors, and Nations? You bet they did. Because those are answers that will be familiar to an audience of people who are educated or want to be educated, which is their target audience.
Now think about the questions we practiced on last week? Did those questions include answers from those groups? Yes. I can point them out if you want.
Now thing of this as a pattern. What we did last week was an introductory set of questions, what was on Hometown Hi-Q were short questions designed to let high school teams compete, and what was on Jeopardy was the Tournament of Champions, and that's supposed to challenge the players who had the most experience of anyone who appears on the show. All three of those have some shared answers and some shared types of clues. What we're doing in a couple weeks will be a little harder than what we did in practice last week, but it's still in the same continuum of questions between the TV show and Jeopardy!'s Tournament of Champions. So it stands to reason that something that exists at the two endpoints will also exist somewhere in between the two endpoints.
That's why we're going to review some of these things before we play in a competition.
We should cover in the next couple weeks:
The Periodic Table
US Presidents
National and State Capitals
Books and Authors
And I am going to create for you flashcard sets for all of these. I'm counting on the first three of these being partially review of something you covered in grade school or had on the wall of your classroom.
[And at this point, I moved on to the practice packets for this week. We worked our way through a packet and a half after this, the first snowstorm of the season meant I slid into the schools parking lot just as practice was supposed to start. Next week I’m going to go a little faster through things, and that’s the point of next week’s lessons.]
Piece of text I have to figure out where to put it into the book to come:
“A surprising factor in what physics and chemistry is covered in quiz bowl is how cool the video of the experiment which explains the phenomenon.”
The point of this is that there are experiments which look really cool and are memorable, and because of their look they stick in the minds of question writers and students alike. But the demonstrations are also chock full of clues that can be used to fill a question, and those don’t stick in the minds of students because they’re not the cool demonstration. While it would be convenient to blame youtube for that, it goes back much further, whether to filmstrips [boop] or Mr. Wizard, or just a presenter who doesn’t write down what’s going on.
I’m going to expand on this for next week using one of the things I should have done either for the first book or its facebook page. I have sat through countless questions on the subject of superconductivity. I’ve learned the subject through quiz bowl, and that seems to be more effective than the cool demonstrations of what you can do with a superconductor and a magnet. The repetition has helped me much more than the students who play on the questions. It’s time to change that.
Specific notes from the shows I watched this week. I made these notes here because we should cover them before they get to playing Hometown High Q, but I also wanted to make note of these because the points could be made during practice:
In subject rounds, you should spend the time before the first question coming up with possible answers which fit the category. [This is a modification of some J! advice I’ve given to people in the past: “If you’re picking a category and some number of answers didn’t spring to mind when the category is read, don’t go there unless you have to.” It’s applicable now given the format of the final round that the high school show has taken.]
Note that there were questions asking you to identify planets in both shows, any time something like that happens in rounds leading up to your round, pay attention because the writer is going through a preset list of answers and putting them in each round in sequence. [We have covered this before here, but it needs to be in the pre-show check of every team that goes on the show.]
The alternate answers may not be added at the same time as the question is written. So in the case that is presented here they gave us clues which indicated the answer should be plural, but the alternate answers were a singular noun and a collective noun that could be either singular or plural. That took the odds down from 33% on a blind guess to 50-50. It's always better to know the answer, but if you don't it's better to be able to eliminate some possibilities before guessing. [Very situational logic, but it would explain why certain questions have very obvious wrong answers, but don’t have a general tendency in how those alternate answers are wrong.]
The question indicated a number of halogens on the periodic table that was true prior to the discovery and naming of tennessine. Sometimes questions exist in the system for a very long time, and the answer doesn't get updated. This question had to have been written at least 5 years ago, and was probably written from an old periodic table. (This is true for television programs, and true for practice questions, but definitely not true for competition, so we shouldn't touch it unless it comes up.) [This I will get into in the book on the idea of question banks versus rounds written just-in-time, but it’s part of a greater section on bulk question writing vs bespoke question writing, which I had promised to write about a year ago, and never completed. Guess what just got a major update.]
When faced with something like this lengthy decimal, which they claimed to be equal to the sine of 35 degrees, and they ask you to calculate the cosine of 55 degrees, the trick here is to recognize that the calculation is not involving this number, but the 35 and 55 degrees, and the relation between sines and cosines. It's also valid on this program to say "it's the same value as shown." when asked for an answer. [Because there is so much of it in some but not all programs, there has to be an optional section on computation questions. I know some will roll their eyes at that inclusion, but to not include tricks for computation acceleration in television circumstances would be negligence. I’ve not included it in these newsletters because it probably won’t be of interest, and it does represent significant value added to those who have those questions in their program.]
Now then if you’ll excuse me, I have to take what I learned from this week’s practice and turn it into next weeks practice plan, and I also have to put 1000 flash cards into a format that supports both Anki and Quizlet imports. See you next week.