Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Dormant threads from the middle school section are preserved here.
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Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Great Bustard »

David Madden
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NHBB middle school

Post by The Polebarn Hotel »

At middle school nationals, there were a couple of typos and badly written questions. For example, in a lightning round, the clue was something like "longest living President, who served in the 70's" and the team answering said "Reagan". Wrong, right? He didn't serve in the 70's! However, the answer said "Gerald Ford Ronald Wilson Reagan". o_o What? Our reader was able to deal with it well (unlike another young man who was faced with a problem that resulted in our team not making playoffs; I'm not going into details here, PM me if you really want to know), but... Really? :lol: I really did like the questions, though, and my only regret is that I didn't get to play more!

Congratulations to Stoller A for winning (they beat us in the aforementioned problem although they shouldn't have, but in all, they deserved to win)! I'm looking forward to competing next year at the JV level.
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Re: NHBB Nationals Discussion Thread

Post by ryanrosenberg »

Crazyflight wrote:At middle school nationals, there were a couple of typos and badly written questions. For example, in a lightning round, the clue was something like "longest living President, who served in the 70's" and the team answering said "Reagan". Wrong, right? He didn't serve in the 70's! However, the answer said "Gerald Ford Ronald Wilson Reagan". o_o
That was a rather unfortunate typo, although I don't think it affected any matches. I believe the set will be used at NHBB's European Championships, so it's not clear yet, but if you have any other comments on specific questions (general commentary can be posted here or sent to me), please email me at the email listed in my profile.

The set was primarily written by Sam Donow and me. Thanks to Ben Zhang, Dylan Minarik, Esther Sun, Matt Powers, and Nick Neuteufel for their help in writing. David Madden was the head editor, with assistance from Raynell Cooper, Alec Vulfson, Sam, and me. The focus of the writing and editing team was first and foremost to make an accessible set, and I think we succeeded in that. All weekend, I saw and heard about very impressive buzzes from all teams, and there were very few tossups going dead. Again, it's going to be used in a couple of weeks, but after that it should be posted online.

Congratulations to Stoller A (OR) on their win, defeating St. Gregory the Great (NJ) by a score of 250-210 in the finals. Longfellow (VA) and Burleigh Manor (MD) were the semifinalists.

edit: Now that I think of it, there's a separate thread for Middle School Nationals. This and the above post should probably go in there.

Done. --Mgmt.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Will the set be posted after its use in Europe?
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Great Bustard »

RyuAqua wrote:Will the set be posted after its use in Europe?
No, though it will likely be available for sale once it's been tightened up (meaning the above issue and a few other things are fixed). In other news, I was very happy with how the logistics of this tournament went - everything ran on or ahead of schedule, and the set up (2 DC sites plus the marriott in crystal city on Saturday, with the top 8 teams at mount vernon on Sunday) was perfect for the field size we had. We're in the process of reexamining how best to integrate the middle school bee and bowl divisions going forward - expect more clarifications on this later this spring or early summer. I will add that we are looking at a minimum of 375 students (!) in Atlanta for middle school History Bee Nationals on June 1, so we're excited about that.
Congratulations to Stoller on their win and thanks to everyone who came! Results are available at historybowl.com through the link available.
David Madden
Ridgewood (NJ) '99, Princeton '03
Founder and Director: International History Bee and Bowl, National History Bee and Bowl (High School Division), International History Olympiad, United States Geography Olympiad, US History Bee, US Academic Bee and Bowl, National Humanities Bee, National Science Bee, International Academic Bowl.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Cheynem »

Why are you selling this set?
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by The Polebarn Hotel »

Standard-winged Nightjar wrote:
RyuAqua wrote:Will the set be posted after its use in Europe?
No, though it will likely be available for sale once it's been tightened up (meaning the above issue and a few other things are fixed). In other news, I was very happy with how the logistics of this tournament went - everything ran on or ahead of schedule, and the set up (2 DC sites plus the marriott in crystal city on Saturday, with the top 8 teams at mount vernon on Sunday) was perfect for the field size we had. We're in the process of reexamining how best to integrate the middle school bee and bowl divisions going forward - expect more clarifications on this later this spring or early summer. I will add that we are looking at a minimum of 375 students (!) in Atlanta for middle school History Bee Nationals on June 1, so we're excited about that.
Congratulations to Stoller on their win and thanks to everyone who came! Results are available at historybowl.com through the link available.
Cheynem wrote:Why are you selling this set?
^^

I was happy with how the tournament ran, with the exception of having to face the top 3 teams, which contributed to us making ninth although we had over 500 points more than the next team in line. I'm not sore about it though - I'm really looking forward to going to Atlanta! That's going to be incredible, and I'm going to lose miserably, but have a lot of fun.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Great Bustard »

Cheynem wrote:Why are you selling this set?
To try and make a living and reinvest what we can in helping to grow our tournaments, and by extension quizbowl in general. NAQT does this too; selling past questions rather than giving them away for free is not unprecedented, nor is it a bad thing. If other people who don't make a living running tournaments want to give their questions away for free want to do so, that of course is their prerogative, but in instances where NHBB oversees the questions directly, we do not typically give them away for free after paying for them to have been written.
David Madden
Ridgewood (NJ) '99, Princeton '03
Founder and Director: International History Bee and Bowl, National History Bee and Bowl (High School Division), International History Olympiad, United States Geography Olympiad, US History Bee, US Academic Bee and Bowl, National Humanities Bee, National Science Bee, International Academic Bowl.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Auroni »

Standard-winged Nightjar wrote:
Cheynem wrote:Why are you selling this set?
To try and make a living and reinvest what we can in helping to grow our tournaments, and by extension quizbowl in general. NAQT does this too; selling past questions rather than giving them away for free is not unprecedented, nor is it a bad thing. If other people who don't make a living running tournaments want to give their questions away for free want to do so, that of course is their prerogative, but in instances where NHBB oversees the questions directly, we do not typically give them away for free after paying for them to have been written.
Don't you make up for the cost for paying writers to write your sets and make a profit in the process by... collecting entry fees from teams playing those tournaments?
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Important Bird Area »

Kenneth Widmerpool wrote:
Standard-winged Nightjar wrote:
Cheynem wrote:Why are you selling this set?
To try and make a living and reinvest what we can in helping to grow our tournaments, and by extension quizbowl in general. NAQT does this too; selling past questions rather than giving them away for free is not unprecedented, nor is it a bad thing. If other people who don't make a living running tournaments want to give their questions away for free want to do so, that of course is their prerogative, but in instances where NHBB oversees the questions directly, we do not typically give them away for free after paying for them to have been written.
Don't you make up for the cost for paying writers to write your sets and make a profit in the process by... collecting entry fees from teams playing those tournaments?
In general, this decision is always a tradeoff between tournament entry fees and the availability of practice material.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by ryanrosenberg »

Speaking personally, and not as a writer of the set, I think that it would make sense for NHBB to release the set online. There is a distinct lack of free middle school practice material available, and the potential monetary gains for NHBB, I think, would be outweighed by the increase in quality of play at Nationals. There are plenty of middle schools all across the country that are interested in quizbowl because of NHBB and want to improve; to wit, many schools this weekend mentioned the studying regimens they had been on, or what they needed to improve on for next year. Having a difficulty-appropriate, NHBB-format set freely available for these teams seems to make a lot of sense from an "establishing interested, motivated programs that will then attend/host NHBB tournaments" perspective.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by the return of AHAN »

Serious question; Is National History Bowl a business or a public trust?
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Great Bustard »

Kenneth Widmerpool wrote: Don't you make up for the cost for paying writers to write your sets and make a profit in the process by... collecting entry fees from teams playing those tournaments?
In part, though having multiple sources of revenue is never a bad thing when 4 people are directly reliant on NHBB generating income for the entirety of their own livelihoods, not to mention the growth of quizbowl as a whole. And while there are indeed a limited number of free sources of middle school questions, the price in question for the set (whatever it ends up being) is not going to be prohibitive.
the return of AHAN wrote:Serious question; Is National History Bowl a business or a public trust?
NHBB is an LLC, like NAQT.
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Founder and Director: International History Bee and Bowl, National History Bee and Bowl (High School Division), International History Olympiad, United States Geography Olympiad, US History Bee, US Academic Bee and Bowl, National Humanities Bee, National Science Bee, International Academic Bowl.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by the return of AHAN »

OK, I'll sit back and wait for a similar cry for Zeecraft, Anderson, Quizmaster, etc. to give away their product to schools that do slap bowl at practices.
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Re: Natl History Bowl Middle School Nationals 5/18-19 (DC/N VA)

Post by Scaled Flowerpiercer »

The Predictable Consequences wrote:Speaking personally, and not as a writer of the set, I think that it would make sense for NHBB to release the set online. There is a distinct lack of free middle school practice material available, and the potential monetary gains for NHBB, I think, would be outweighed by the increase in quality of play at Nationals. There are plenty of middle schools all across the country that are interested in quizbowl because of NHBB and want to improve; to wit, many schools this weekend mentioned the studying regimens they had been on, or what they needed to improve on for next year. Having a difficulty-appropriate, NHBB-format set freely available for these teams seems to make a lot of sense from an "establishing interested, motivated programs that will then attend/host NHBB tournaments" perspective.
In part, though having multiple sources of revenue is never a bad thing when 4 people are directly reliant on NHBB generating income for the entirety of their own livelihoods, not to mention the growth of quizbowl as a whole. And while there are indeed a limited number of free sources of middle school questions, the price in question for the set (whatever it ends up being) is not going to be prohibitive.
(Again speaking not as a writer of the set), while I also agree that availability is often a good thing, I think that the fact that a good amount of near-appropriate difficulty (e.g High School NHBB C-sets) means that not publicly releasing the set won't totally cut off teams - also, if the price is fairly low, then selling the set should help NHBB a lot more than it would hurt any team that could be afraid of the price. Also, just as something that came to mind while writing this, if an interested Middle School team has to make a purchase from NHBB to access the set, that could be a useful way for NHBB to obtain school contact info.

Also, I definitely agree with Ryan that if there is any feedback on the set, you can send it to either him or me: though if the only major issue is the one referenced above, I would be happy with that too.
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