We had the third practice this week. I've been trying to go into each with both a theme and a plan. This week's theme was speed and the rules, and this week's plan was to go as fast as possible. I want any team I'm associated with to be able to function at speed because you can always react to a slowdown in competition, but if the game picks up speed, you're likely to get rolled by an opponent who can deal with speed.
Part of that meant I told them the plan from beginning of practice, and this is also where I started cracking down on the think time, and tightening down on the rules. With one more practice after this week before we play a tournament, we need to know that we can play according to the rules. So even though we didn't have an opponent across the table from the team, we went with the tight rules:
- 3 seconds after tossup buzz
- 5 seconds for bonus part
- 10 seconds on computation
On balance, most moderators are more lenient than those times in local tournaments, but again, if you can do the tasks fast, you can do the tasks slow.
I also laid down the tight rules that you play lax in the first practice.
- Buzz on tossup
- No conferring on tossups
- Please confer on bonus questions
- Designate if you have to, and be in the habit of having to designate.
I had already laid down the golden rules of answers, but I did remind them.
- Last names only
- Never give more information than you have to.
And I gave them the ideas of scoring:
- There is reward for buzzing in early, but there's also risk.
I've read a set with power for the first three practices, so they're familiar with the concept, but until now, I never really highlighted the idea of "there's no -5 after the tossup is read."
- ALWAYS take a shot in a zero risk situation.
What I haven't added to this lesson is the key point:
- There is an optimal risk you should be willing to accept, always buzzing in early isn't it, and never buzzing in without certainty or waiting to the end of the questions aren't feasible either.
The reason I haven't touched on risk is that I lack good examples to show, and I'm not sure it's a lesson you can learn in the weeks prior to playing your first real opponents. As I've mentioned before, we're still at just three players, and until you see someone bury themselves in negs, or you do it to yourself, that's an abstract lesson. The Hometown High-Q broadcasts are not yet using a format that has interaction between teams, so there's no analogue to show there. Jeopardy! is the closest source I can show, but the Tournament of Champions had such heavy situational turns on Daily Doubles that I couldn't show that to them.
After the second practice, I gave a pre-mortem to the coach, and the first item to be worked on was the idea of speed and execution of the rules. After that enabled me to clarify the next steps, I'm writing a pre-mortem for me (and I assume, you the reader):
1. The team is going to be weaker in science than in other categories, and that's a simple fact of that we don't have any seniors. What that means is that we're missing the courses that get slotted in for seniors, physics, and chemistry, beyond the parts of those courses that were reviewing things from middle school science. And even though we're going into a tournament of "introductory difficulty", the distribution isn't tweaked to reflect that. That's a problem, we're trying a plan (shown below) to make sure we at least have that review portion covered.
2. Currently, we have three personalities with distinct levels of confidence in their abilities. I'll describe their positions left to right in the last practice. Left side, we have someone who knows the some of the material, but doesn't know she knows the material until it's too late. The problem for her will not be development, it will be making sure her confidence builds enough to overcome the pause of recognition, to take risks and buzz in. The center does not lack confidence, but lacks the control to wait for the clues to confirm their suspicion. This is naturally fixed by experience of getting burned a couple times, I wish there was a less painful way to do this. The right player has been perfect in practice, getting every tossup she attempts. But every tossup she attempts is done right after the last word has been read. The solution there is to try to move her towards acting on the final clues which are clearly confirming her suspicions rather than waiting for those to come to her. It's extraordinary that each of them is in a different non-optimal position with confidence, and I think I'm going to have to explain each of their positions to them.
3. This offense looks like a bunch of 10s right now, with very little going absolutely dead by the end of the question, but it also looks like they're going to get beaten or more likely frustrated on tossups by a more experienced team. If the tournament bonus difficulty is commensurate with what we're seeing in practice, they should be very good, but the whole is going to be when questions switch categories between parts. They're not quite trusting each other's ideas, and contributing to the same bonus. That will come in time.
4. Going to their first tournament means they will play twice more matches, and hear twice as many questions as they'll have played in practice thus far. There's a lot they don't know they don't know yet. And this is going to be twice the total exertion they've had in all practices. I need to give them the guidance to get through the day with energy, and the ability to still learn from their mistakes.
The fact that I can even write out 2 and 3 at this point is good. I've got one more practice to teach this before the tournament, and this is basically the blueprint for what I have to say to them. The role 4 will play in the last practice is three-fold. I have to teach them to scorekeep, to note what they don't know, and to know when the day is tiring them out, and counteract that. It's a different sort of ambitious plan than what the book to be has to lay out, but it's doable.
Last week, I mentioned I wanted to lay out a potential article on superconductivity, as it's a subject which comes up time and again in tournaments.
Superconductivity is the loss of electrical resistance in a material, which is a result rising from quantum mechanical phenomena. It was first found by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in solidified mercury, cooled to a temperature of 4.2 Kelvin. The common feature of superconducting materials is the cryogenic temperatures at which they work. So called "high-temperature" superconductors can function at temperatures of 30 K, or are able to cooled by liquid nitrogen. YBCO or Yttrium Barium Copper Oxides are a class of high-temprature superconductors frequently mentioned in questions, as are cuprate-perovskite ceramics. YBCO's critical temperature is higher than the boiling point of nitrogen. Theoretical models of superconduction include the Ginzburg-Landau theory and the BCS theory named for John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer. A key part of the BCS theory is the notion of electrons bound together and interacting with each other, known as Cooper pairs. The Cooper pairs are able to be in the same quantum state, allowing for superconductivity, but thermal energy can easily disrupt the interaction, necessitating low temperatures. The most notable use of superconductivity arises from the expulsion of magnetic fields in a superconducting material. This phenomenon, known as the Meissner effect, allows a magnetic substance to be repulsed by a superconductor, acting as an extreme diamagnetic material, even to the point of allowing magnetic levitation of an object.
(The clue about Kamerling Onnes is tricky to work with in questions since superfluidity was also observed at a lower temperature in the same experiment.)
I'm not an expert in the field so I may lose some detail in summarization. The fact is, what I know about superconductivity comes from three sources, a half-remembered magazine article, demo experiments where the Meissner effect was shown to do maglev, and hundreds of quizbowl questions. It is not ideal to have no understanding of the underlying theories, but since my primary application of my knowledge is to teach the concept for quiz bowl, it's not as bad as if I were teaching it for a class.
How I ended up writing this today was examining a bunch of questions, and noting the clues that were repeated, and applying this to writing a more coherent set of clues into the text. When I did this for the facebook page, and especially for the first book, I used NAQT's database to get an estimate of number of uses of clues and answers. I've kept myself off of that database for a year, figuring that I'd probably be helping coach Catie's school's team pretty soon, and I wanted to avoid the possible idea the team would have inside information; to write the above, I had to look to another database. I remembered that quizdb.org existed, and I applied the problem to it. https://www.quizdb.org/?query=electronegativity There you can see where I pulled the items I highlighted in the paragraph, and why I pulled them. When you have a database like this publicly available, you can use it to build guides for your team. It's not an easy task, but you can build an archive of training materials that your team can use and learn from. They shouldn't be seen as authoritative texts to create new questions, but training to give your team the insight to use in play.
In writing this, I discovered that quizdb.org is slated to go offline permanently next week on the 28th. My thanks to Raynor Kuang's service in putting this searchable archive together, and I know others are compiling better versions that will replace it. Until then, ask yourself: "What subjects would I benefit from knowing what clues the corps of quiz bowl writers judge important?" Go query those subjects, and save page.
The other promised thing from last week was 1000 flashcards to the team. This was less taxing than you would expect, since I've had most of the databases collected from publicly available sources. I've written about most of the major pieces in articles here: The squeezing of all the questions out of a book during lunch at a tournament yielded 20 questions, sets of orderly information used as last clues (partly the review pieces I needed to include of chemistry and physics, the periodic table and SI units) were passed through a python script and yielded 800-900 questions, and my habit of writing one question a day saw its yield redirected into this effort collecting 100 of the "things that come up as singular facts in multiple questions, both in televised competition and non-televised." It will be the basis of some value added material for the book to come, but I have to figure a way to make it an addon without being part of the text. Beyond that, there's the problem that, even at 1140 flashcards, it barely scratches the surface of information, even in the limited categories I intended.