Week 245: Winter approaches
Predictions of the first snow put me in a mind of setting up for continuity disruptions.
The long winter is coming. As we approach the point where sunset is before 5pm, I’m setting up for the time where I will get into work before the sun rises, and leave after the sun sets. The point where I don’t have outside distractions, just the feeling like I’m getting home at half past midnight every night. Tomorrow threatens the first actual snow, though it won’t stick, so I need to do the last clippings of the outside plants, lest I lose the small achievements of basil and parsley.
We're also approaching Thanksgiving and we haven't been given the alert to be ready to compete on TV in a month. I'm now working from the assumption that we won't be on until January at the earliest. On one hand that's bad because I know that December is just a miserable period for continuity in your team. To keep out of conflicts with other clubs, we've moved Seton practices to Thursday which means we'll lose a practice, next week, so that isn't going to be good for continuity either. The only comfort is that being aware of it is a better prevention of its effects than ignorance. To combat that I've started preparing additional pieces to prepare for the TV show which don't depend on practice.
I've been adding new items to the OTW reading lists for the team, and expanding them out with other things, but I really need to merge them back into the original schedule. I may chain that with things that I had earlier created for the team, like simulated games of the show, quizlet flashcards, and Kahoot! quizzes, to create ways for the less experienced players to catch up outside of practice.
The reason for last week's adventures in typography was that I was updating my computation pocketmod to include more material, and I wanted to review the past year's data on computation questions before pushing an update. That got accomplished at last week's practice. I'm happy with that because I now have a document I don't need to correct and which is packed cleanly with as much material as I could place into eight sheets. I'm now toying with the idea of creating at least three more pocket mods for televised quiz bowl: Geography, Mythology, and Word Roots.
Geography would have to be primarily maps, but it would also be primarily something that the player needs to put the information into. When I built a test pocketmod for the team which included an unfilled periodic table, I realized the potential that incomplete information and forcing someone to fill it in with the information THEY deem important can be. A pocketmod like that would also be a repeatable exercise for the student which they could iterate on the same map including more information on each cycle, and then print a new one to begin the cycle again. It would also be a possibility for me to play with the notion of color printing these, to cover flags or features like rivers, but I have to account for the possibility that players wouldn’t have color printing available for themselves.
I had considered Science in the slot where I put Mythology here. I had figured that Science knowledge is really designed to be organized into chronologies, diagrams, and components that would easily fit on the pocket mods, but the amount of information I was thinking could go onto a science pocketmod was greater than the space available, and started to go above the scope of televised competition. Mythology on the other hand could see its television scope covered on a pocketmod AND tie into the naming conventions of astronomical bodies. That would allow me to cover the two subjects fully (for television) in a single document. The main problem I expect to have with this is using pocketmod's markdown scripting to cover genealogical data (family trees) in a concise way.
The third pocketmod to work on is Greek and Latin word roots. That also covers a good bit of the science questions on television, which are really vocabulary packaging science. This is less true for the heavy picture format we're working with locally this year, but it's something lots of other people could use. But it's also something that I hadn't given to the team, and is easily convertible from something I've written in the book drafts, and can be converted into markdown quickly.
At the beginning of the month, we realized we didn’t have enough players to go to a tournament on November 9. Because we would miss that tournament at Pitt, but I wanted to export some books from my ever-expanding collection, I had planned to deliver a bag of books to the tournament and then go back to the convention center, where my wife was running a show. When I reached out to Pitt to get the prize books to the tournament side, I was told that they still had my books from the tournament in April which had been cancelled. So now I had a set of books in a bag which I had marked for shipment, which I now had time to extract questions from. And since I now had time, it would behoove me to press through all those books and extract questions out of them.
Every time that I send out a stack of prizes, I get that pang of “I should have done something with those.” Even if it’s a book that I have sent out another copy before, there’s always that feeling of needing to get something out of it, rather than simply purchasing it then sending it out. Being ten books ahead until February I could plan to keep that advantage, or even build on it.
Tonight I put a plan for that into motion. I disassembled all the stuff on my desk at home and stacked everything into place. The back row against the wall is the books that I have on hand that were part of the five-foot bookshelf. The pile to the left is twelve high, representing the ten books I was going to send to Pitt as prizes, plus two books I bought to be prizes over the summer. The right side is empty except for the aerogarden I planted for winter. In the middle is the laptop, and the desk has a pullout shelf on each side for a legal pad. The books on the left will get read between now and January 1, and their notes will go into either paper copies, or into Obsidian on the laptop. Once extracted, they’re going into the tall drawer to be sent out as prizes in spring tournaments. It’s as compact and distraction-free a design as I can manage. We’ll see if it will work for question writing, and finishing the book.