NHBB Regional Tournaments - General Discussion

[Great Bustard]

I will be making a series of posts shortly regarding our upcoming National Championships, but with the penultimate weekend of NHBB regional tournaments upon us this Saturday, I wanted to start a general discussion on our regional tournaments. Please use this thread to comment on any aspects of our regional and state tournaments (hereafter simply regionals, as designated state championship tournaments basically function identically). Let us and everyone know what you liked, what you didn't like, how you think we can improve your experience at Regionals, what you want more of, less of, etc.
For some background, by our final Regional tournaments a week from Saturday, we will have run 79 high school tournaments, not including our international division. This compares to 63 last year and 32 the first year. We ran our first tournaments this year (or will run) in the Rochester, NY area, Western PA, Eastern VA, Southwest VA, Southern GA, Central FL (x2), the Florida Panhandle, East TN, Southwest OH, Nevada, California Central Valley, Oregon, and Eastern WA. At this point, all plans for next year will be a function of how this year's National Championships goes, so I don't want to speculate about additional tournaments or regions for now, though if you want to comment on that, go ahead.
Beyond that, please give us whatever feedback you have on the below listed topics and more. This isn't really the place, though, to discuss the US Geography Challenge (except as it pertains to the logistics of Regionals) as I'll have a separate post for that. Any and all constructive comments are welcome. Finally, do NOT yet mention specific questions, as all 3 regionals sets are still currently active):
-Questions (length, difficulty, which sets were used where, distribution, etc. - again, don't mention specific questions!)
-Game format (four quarter format, tossups vs. bonuses, 60 second rounds, superpowers, etc.)
-Logistics (outreach, pre-tournament communication, post-tournament communication, directors, buzzers, readers, timing, problems encountered, what worked, what didn't, etc.)
-History Bee (format, difficulty, length of rounds, position in the day's schedule, bee finals, how to encourage participation, etc.)
-General stuff (are we meeting your expectations? falling short in some ways? exceeding them in others? etc.)
Thanks for your support this year- Greg, Eric, Nick, Nolwenn, and I really appreciate it, and want to continue growing and improving NHBB for many years to come. Anything you suggest that can help further that process would be greatly welcome.

[i never see pigeons in wheeling]

The Quarter 2 bonuses should seriously be discarded. They serve no purpose and are ridiculously variable in difficulty. They also give an outsize advantage to people who happen to do well on those particular questions as opposed to the Quarter 1 tossups, which are considerably lower in overall game value because they lack bonuses despite the fact that they are virtually identical to Quarter 2 tossups.

Also, the trash that's written should be firmly grounded in something historical. They should not be generic trash questions one would see at quiz bowl tournaments or trash tournaments, as it were, but rather a topic that has actual historical implications which are reflected in the question-writing. Much of the trash managed to accomplish this, but some did not.

I felt the variety built in to the questions was good, adequately reflecting the scope of history. I wish they would experiment a bit more with answer lines that go beyond the pale and venture into historiography, modern historical debates, etc. Tossing up somebody like David MCullough, whose books one might have read as a history aficionado, should be kosher for this competition.

[Sniper, No Sniping!]

Does it compromise the questions to say that I think there should be less "history of" questions? If they aren't purely social studies, I don't think they should be in the competition. Some questions (namely trash) I don't think were really pertinent to history, academically or culturally.

With that said, I enjoyed 95% of the questions, the other 5%, such as trash and "history of" other disciplines (lit, science, etc) I thought could be done without.

Regarding the sixty second rounds; I felt that every game we played, there were always one category that sounded interesting, one that didn't sound that bad, and one that sounded very unappealing, or two categories that sounded either good or not unappealing and the third sounded awful. Anyone else share this sentiment?

Bee finals - is there a reason why the rule was changed to where you need to reach six, instead of five, to win the finals? I think there also shouldn't be trash in the bee finals.

[czheng0708]

When will this year's question sets be released? I definitely will want to check something out in one of the sets.

[Great Bustard]

When will this year's question sets be released? I definitely will want to check something out in one of the sets.

Within the hour, I think. HSAPQ is working on it.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Are hosts finding that they can capably host the Geography Challenge nested within the Bee nested within the Bowl and still comfortably finish them all on time? Is there confusion at local sites about who is registering and paying for which competition(s)? How might such confusion be alleviated, and must one event get cut to make the day workable?

I haven't done any NHBB directing this year, but I remember last year (in 2011-12) a Bowl schedule was dictated to me by email and we had to come up with a minimally-repeating Bee schedule on our own, despite having little intuition on how to do so (though Ashvin eventually math-wizarded it out). How much scheduling is currently dictated for less experienced hosts, and how much for more experiened hosts? Must there be 5 rounds of prelims at every Bowl? Does NHBB have set schedules for which students should be in which rooms for a Bee with more people than can fit in a single room, so as to minimize repeat groupings of kids and ensure that every individual is eventually in a room with as many other individuals as possible, or do hosts still have to sort of wing it? Do math types know if a minimal-repeat Bee schedule can be generated easily?

[jonpin]

Are hosts finding that they can capably host the Geography Challenge nested within the Bee nested within the Bowl and still comfortably finish them all on time? Is there confusion at local sites about who is registering and paying for which competition(s)? How might such confusion be alleviated, and must one event get cut to make the day workable?

I haven't done any NHBB directing this year, but I remember last year (in 2011-12) a Bowl schedule was dictated to me by email and we had to come up with a minimally-repeating Bee schedule on our own, despite having little intuition on how to do so (though Ashvin eventually math-wizarded it out). How much scheduling is currently dictated for less experienced hosts, and how much for more experiened hosts? Must there be 5 rounds of prelims at every Bowl? Does NHBB have set schedules for which students should be in which rooms for a Bee with more people than can fit in a single room, so as to minimize repeat groupings of kids and ensure that every individual is eventually in a room with as many other individuals as possible, or do hosts still have to sort of wing it? Do math types know if a minimal-repeat Bee schedule can be generated easily?

I can't say how the Bee was organized at the typical tournament, but I was the one who set the draw for the varsity bee at Ridgewood, and here was my procedure (which I slightly botched) and others should feel free to copy or mimic it:
1. Determine the number of rooms (number of players / 6, rounded to the nearest whole number), call that "n".
2. By reputation, past performance, etc., give the top n students "1" seeds. If you know enough to do so, give the next n students "2" seeds.
3. Group the remaining students by school, and assign some block of schools "3" seeds, "4" seeds, etc. This ensures that unseeded students from the same school are in the same band and will not have to compete against each other in the prelims.
4. Arbitrarily/randomly assign one student from each seed-line into each room for Round 1.
5. This is the key to avoid repeats: For round 2 and again for round 3, students move "clockwise" through the room list a number of spots equal to their seed line.

So if there are 8 rooms, a "1" seed might compete in room 2, room 3, room 4. A "3" seed might compete in room 4, room 7, room 2 (7 + 3 = 10, which wraps around to be 2). A "6" seed could be in room 4, room 2, room 8. If there are few enough rooms, it might not be possible to apply this fully, in which case you want to make sure no student is matched up with the same "1" seed all three rounds basically by sight.