The Big Vision: [10] Looking Outside Quizbowl for Ideas?
Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 8:28 pm
This thread is the last part of the "The Big Vision" series. Click here to go back to index/introduction.
Looking Outside Quizbowl for Ideas?
Seeing if other organized mind competitions inspire thoughts, without blindly copying stuff that doesn’t work for us
Many quizbowl players, coaches, etc. engage seriously in many other extracurriculars of a similar, “mind competition” bent. Quizbowl is unique in a lot of ways, and has figured out what works for quizbowl pretty well. But it can’t hurt for people with experience in other activities to look at the way other activities do things, and see if there are aspects of how things are done elsewhere that might be worthwhile to learn from. (Positively or negatively -- there could be some aspects of having more funding/sponsorship [as another activity might] that we seriously want to avoid as we move forward.)
In my case, my usual comparison point (if you haven’t gathered by now) is the time I spent in policy debate, an activity which does a lot well and does a lot of other things in a way which didn’t gel well with me. My high school had a pretty well-established debate program, and began training all “novices” for serious national-circuit success the instant they joined the team. It became clear to me very quickly that while the activity did many things right, some aspects of it frustrated me. One such issue was the very strong bifurcation between the very best teams and everybody else; basically every tournament was split between Varsity and Novice divisions, and the learning curve for ‘breaking’ to the (always single-elim) playoffs was very, very steep. There were far fewer events which qualified teams for nationals, and teams which wanted to attend the most prestigious national (the Tournament of Champions, or TOC) had to finish in the top few teams at two events during the year to qualify. Because nationals qualification was much more limited, and many serious schools had far more financial resources at their disposal, the country could be basically split into a “national circuit” of teams who could fly to the most prestigious qualifiers from Friday through Monday every single weekend on one hand, and teams focused on state & local events on the other. (Since each round was two to three hours long, and most tournaments offered 5 to 7 rounds, almost every debate tournament took two or three days to complete.) I think that among the eight or so tournaments I attended, only two were in driving distance. As it turned out, I was not very interested in national-circuit debate success in the way that I later was in quizbowl. Part of this is that quizbowl allows a far more robust level of same-day trips and local participation in most areas. I’d like to ensure that local competitions with same-day travel continue to be the staple of our game’s organization. It then became clear to me that there was no way to do the activity “for fun” or at a more casual/relaxed pace -- the opportunity cost was just too high for all the time it threatened to take.
But there were many very things which impressed me in my time in policy debate as well, which we could look towards. Many tournaments were able to get over a hundred “judges,” including dozens of retired high school players, to staff rounds by paying them something for their time. Several of the best teams were able to up the number of serious coaches to two or three (comparatively very rare in quizbowl), allowing the extra adults to focus on training novices or on preparing in specialty areas. For kids who really wanted to improve, there was a very serious culture of summer camp training (some kids went to two or three camps in one summer, and each one lasted 2-4 weeks compared to our usual one-week programs). And of course, there’s the fact that colleges accepted serious debate scholarships.
Perhaps other people have seen other activities which make for interesting bouts of compare-contrast, both with regards to specific protocol and general culture. (Model UN/Congress? Math team?) (Or even from some sports? Though we obviously don’t do single elimination if we can help it, and we’re a lot less restricted by the need for huge astroturf fields or by the threat of physical injury.) I can’t claim to have done every thing -- few of us can -- so I imagine there’s a lot of interesting ideas to be dug up once we start doing “comparative literature” on the other things that are out there. As our activity expands, we can also expect to foresee some problems on the horizon, by taking a look at other activities which have them, and try to pre-empt. (One example: As far as I’m aware, on average high school quizbowlers at hotels for nationals, two-day tournaments, etc. are exceedingly well-behaved compared to average. Let’s keep it that way .)
It might also be interesting to try and cross-pollinate some of our good ideas with other competitions if we happen to have players who are involved in both. For example: Many debate tournaments used power matching/Swiss pairs to determine who plays whom from round to round. But in doing so, they actually had to wait for all of the records from the last match to come in and tabulate new pairings every single round. It remains confusing to me why other activities in that situation haven’t figured out the HSNCT-style card system; it’d save them hours of time.
******
With that, I've now posted everything I have to start us off. Again, I welcome general thoughts/comments in the replies to part 1, and specific comments under their respective threads.
Looking Outside Quizbowl for Ideas?
Seeing if other organized mind competitions inspire thoughts, without blindly copying stuff that doesn’t work for us
Many quizbowl players, coaches, etc. engage seriously in many other extracurriculars of a similar, “mind competition” bent. Quizbowl is unique in a lot of ways, and has figured out what works for quizbowl pretty well. But it can’t hurt for people with experience in other activities to look at the way other activities do things, and see if there are aspects of how things are done elsewhere that might be worthwhile to learn from. (Positively or negatively -- there could be some aspects of having more funding/sponsorship [as another activity might] that we seriously want to avoid as we move forward.)
In my case, my usual comparison point (if you haven’t gathered by now) is the time I spent in policy debate, an activity which does a lot well and does a lot of other things in a way which didn’t gel well with me. My high school had a pretty well-established debate program, and began training all “novices” for serious national-circuit success the instant they joined the team. It became clear to me very quickly that while the activity did many things right, some aspects of it frustrated me. One such issue was the very strong bifurcation between the very best teams and everybody else; basically every tournament was split between Varsity and Novice divisions, and the learning curve for ‘breaking’ to the (always single-elim) playoffs was very, very steep. There were far fewer events which qualified teams for nationals, and teams which wanted to attend the most prestigious national (the Tournament of Champions, or TOC) had to finish in the top few teams at two events during the year to qualify. Because nationals qualification was much more limited, and many serious schools had far more financial resources at their disposal, the country could be basically split into a “national circuit” of teams who could fly to the most prestigious qualifiers from Friday through Monday every single weekend on one hand, and teams focused on state & local events on the other. (Since each round was two to three hours long, and most tournaments offered 5 to 7 rounds, almost every debate tournament took two or three days to complete.) I think that among the eight or so tournaments I attended, only two were in driving distance. As it turned out, I was not very interested in national-circuit debate success in the way that I later was in quizbowl. Part of this is that quizbowl allows a far more robust level of same-day trips and local participation in most areas. I’d like to ensure that local competitions with same-day travel continue to be the staple of our game’s organization. It then became clear to me that there was no way to do the activity “for fun” or at a more casual/relaxed pace -- the opportunity cost was just too high for all the time it threatened to take.
But there were many very things which impressed me in my time in policy debate as well, which we could look towards. Many tournaments were able to get over a hundred “judges,” including dozens of retired high school players, to staff rounds by paying them something for their time. Several of the best teams were able to up the number of serious coaches to two or three (comparatively very rare in quizbowl), allowing the extra adults to focus on training novices or on preparing in specialty areas. For kids who really wanted to improve, there was a very serious culture of summer camp training (some kids went to two or three camps in one summer, and each one lasted 2-4 weeks compared to our usual one-week programs). And of course, there’s the fact that colleges accepted serious debate scholarships.
Perhaps other people have seen other activities which make for interesting bouts of compare-contrast, both with regards to specific protocol and general culture. (Model UN/Congress? Math team?) (Or even from some sports? Though we obviously don’t do single elimination if we can help it, and we’re a lot less restricted by the need for huge astroturf fields or by the threat of physical injury.) I can’t claim to have done every thing -- few of us can -- so I imagine there’s a lot of interesting ideas to be dug up once we start doing “comparative literature” on the other things that are out there. As our activity expands, we can also expect to foresee some problems on the horizon, by taking a look at other activities which have them, and try to pre-empt. (One example: As far as I’m aware, on average high school quizbowlers at hotels for nationals, two-day tournaments, etc. are exceedingly well-behaved compared to average. Let’s keep it that way .)
It might also be interesting to try and cross-pollinate some of our good ideas with other competitions if we happen to have players who are involved in both. For example: Many debate tournaments used power matching/Swiss pairs to determine who plays whom from round to round. But in doing so, they actually had to wait for all of the records from the last match to come in and tabulate new pairings every single round. It remains confusing to me why other activities in that situation haven’t figured out the HSNCT-style card system; it’d save them hours of time.
******
With that, I've now posted everything I have to start us off. Again, I welcome general thoughts/comments in the replies to part 1, and specific comments under their respective threads.