I began the practice before spring break with a simulated game to model what we’d see during taping. There would only be one more practice before taping, and that would be the day before, so this was the last real chance for adjustment and working on problems. So without further ado…
Simulated game #2
Reminder that this format is five rounds: Category Round, Picture Round, 60-second round, math round, and More or Less, which is basically two 30-20-10 questions.
Category rounds to choose from: State capitals by nickname, the Great Lakes, English Monarchs or On What Planet... (+25 correct/-0 incorrect)
The categories for this time were designed to be things that could be asked, to things that would help if one question in the category were asked.
I made them select first to get them thinking about what they really like about categories, and then I took it away from them. I asked them to pretend like they had the second choice and English Monarchs went first. I asked them to think about the answers that could appear in each, and to spend the time that the first team got for their questions to come up with answers for their choice subject. They went with Great Lakes, and despite me giving them seven questions instead of the usual five, I kind of stumped them by not having all five of the expected answers as answers: (Lake Superior/St. Lawrence Seaway/Edmund Fitzgerald/Mackinac Island/Toronto/Niagara Falls/Green Bay) I sort of wanted to accomplish that, but probably not as effectively as I did.
Picture Round: 5 different picture based questions. (+20/-20)
I didn't pull pictures for the picture round, I pretended like there were pictures there: So I asked them to assume the first team's five questions were about Tabasco, Pi, The Uffizi gallery in Florence, bromine, and exterior angles, with pictures of the sauce, the letter, the museum, the element, and a polygon. Then I asked them to identify the capital of French Guiana which shares its name with a chili pepper, the Greek letter Rho, Where the Pushkin museum is, what element is a yellowish gas, and what kind of angles are congruent because they are at an intersection of lines.
60 second round: 10 questions one category (+10/0)
Because the 60-second round tends toward being a crapshoot, I gave them a neutral General Knowledge round. Since I wanted to reinforce the skills of working as a team, working through the captain, and knowing to pass appropriately, general knowledge across all categories and slightly too difficult is the best course to run them through.
Math Time 2 questions (+20/-20)
I doubled the math time round, but only scored the first two questions. I gave them two vocabulary two computation, alternating because the past six weeks or so have seen the questions in this section tend more towards vocabulary. I figured this was the section that we know is most likely to derail us by the grade of the players and their previous experience.
More or Less (depending on number of clues used: +30 to +10/-30 to -10)
The 30-20-10 round I gave them a President and hieroglyphics, figuring I wanted to check their strategy. One of our new players had done Academic Games League earlier in the year, and so Presidents is a wheelhouse. I wanted to see how certain the team was when they had a good idea, and how uncertain the team was when they didn't but there was a very obvious guess in front of them. "How many writing systems could be an answer?"
Taking the score from the first selections in each round they ended up at 190. Not what I wanted to see, since on average every team in the playoffs had managed to break 200, but I could have made it too hard.
I then walked them through five more 60 second rounds: The three that I hadn't given them for the category rounds, plus mythology and a titles category. Those went about as expected, they were good on mythology, bad on titles, bad on astronomy, and good on city nicknames, having run through that for state capitals. Again, I wanted to see them working together as a team, and passing or guessing when appropriate. If the subject was something they hadn't had it was a learning experience.
I then told them that I was putting these into quizlet and so during their two week break from school, they could use all of this to review. I also added a large number of "title with common missing word" flashcards and the "Americana History" set I mentioned to you in an earlier newsletter. All in all, there would be about 500 questions there for review. And then I let them go on break. Some were mentally there already.
I finished the day with a pre-mortem. If you don't remember this practice from the first taping: a pre-mortem is what you do to shape your final effort in the close of a project. You work from the assumption: "We have gotten to the end of the project. It ended catastrophically. What happened to cause the catastrophic ending, and how can we remove the conditions that led to that ending?"
This was my pre-mortem for playoffs:
We still are weak at math. With it being at least 1/12 of your total questions asked, that’s not good.
We still are weak at science, unless it involves a periodic table, but it is unlikely this is what kills us as most of the small amount of science that we've seen involves precisely that.
We are stronger at history than the field, much stronger at mythology, art, but only one of those is demonstrably helpful.
We probably are weaker at geography for what we've put into it. Though we've got study guides available in our team drive, we haven't been using them.
We are not good at quiz bowl chestnuts, this is a function of me knowing what chestnuts are there, and I only remember to include them in teaching when I see them. Since most of the things I see now are episodes that won't repeat in the timeframe, we don't get the benefit of the knowledge.
If things get way harder in the playoffs it won't play to our advantage as the first round did. Difficulty curved up goes to superior experience. And not to superior experience of the coach. We're likely to have one opponent that's been to nationals before, and that same opponent has been to playoffs in the previous year's program.
The questions are starting to resemble the old questions from previous years. By that I mean the questions are not uniformly relying on the image to clue the question, but are solvable from the host's reading of the question. While I had given them training to get ready for that format last year, I'd focused on the new format shift. What did I emphasize in the previous year, through practice questions or study guides that is now a distant memory?
Finally, what would be the most embarrassing way to lost this match? I finally set upon it. If there were a cache of visual questions, which could be used for practice, and I didn't point it out to the team, I'd be justified in being embarrassed. So yes, if there were questions asked that could have been answered through close watching of Fox's The Floor, that would be the most embarrassing way to fail.
At this point we were 14 days away from the taping, and I had the sinking feeling of a man who accidentally signed his own execution notice. I spent the next ten days adding things to quizlet and kahoot to avoid our fate.
OTW
I am going to switch terminology for mathematics after next week, and I may switch around some other things at that point. The one that I will point out especially is zeolites, because I saw that in the list of minerals and remembered a flood of missed part C’s where that was the answer.
# Poem OTW: Do Not Go Gentle in to That Good Night
https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
# Poet OTW: Dylan Thomas
https://poets.org/poet/dylan-thomas
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW
# Art Movement OTW: Vienna Secession
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/hwWx1iIaFkocLA
# Painting OTW: The Kiss
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/zQURmESPplFKJQ
# Mythological Figure OTW: Europa
https://pantheon.org/articles/e/europa.html
# Bridge OTW: Ponte Vecchio
https://www.visitflorence.com/florence-monuments/ponte-vecchio.html
# Mineral OTW: Zeolites
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/zeolites/
# National Park OTW: Isle Royale
https://nps.gov/isro/index.htm
# Presidential Election OTW: 1824
https://www.270towin.com/1824_Election/
# Battle OTW: Agincourt
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/battle-of-agincourt
# Star OTW: Cygnus X-1
https://earthsky.org/space/cygnus-x-1-black-hole-more-massive-farther/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Hydra
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/hydra.html
# Chemistry History OTW: Synthetic Rubber
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/syntheticrubber.html
# History Podcast OTW: The beginning of the English Revolution, and the podcast
http://traffic.libsyn.com/revolutionspodcast/001-_The_Kingdoms_of_Charles_Stuart.mp3?dest-id=160000
# In Our Time OTW: Kinetic Theory of Gases
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00057s5
# You Gotta Know OTW: Monsters of Greek Myth
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/greek-mythological-monsters.html
# Team History OTW: Brewers
https://www.mlb.com/brewers/history/timeline-1960s
# Opera Synopsis OTW: Don Giovanni
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/don-giovanni/
# Art Controversy OTW: Birth of a Nation
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/birthofanation.html