Monday, February 12, 2018

Update: Science Olympiad Thornton Invitationals

Hi all! Before I go on to the post, there are a few things one should know about Science Olympiad and how our invitationals worked.

  1. Everybody has 3-4 events with a partner(I had 4)
  2. An event is basically a topic/subject the pair of members have to study for
  3. Events can either be build(where we have to build something that does a certain task) or theory(where we have to study the topic so we can do a test the day of the competition
  4. In Thornton, there are 3 teams, Blue, Black, and Yellow(in order of ranking)
  5. Nandy and I are in team Black
  6. In any event, we can either get first, second, or third(only 3 teams)
Now that you kind of know the rules, I can tell you how it went for me and some of my teammates:
  • We(Nandy and I) got 1st in Fast Facts!
    • We had studied most of the categories they tested us on, but we(*Nandy*) brain farted on some of her categories. This led us to guess half of it because there was no penalty for guessing and my dad said to leave nothing blank.
    • The judges, including my dad, spent 90 minutes grading it because they had to search up each word to make sure if each of our guesses were factual or not. 😉
  • We(Nandy and I) got 2nd in Disease Detectives.
    • We think they made an error when they were grading ours because our answer was scientifically correct, but they marked it wrong
    • It would be really sad for us if they actually made an error because we would have gotten first place if we got one more question right. 😞
  • We(Arul and I) got 2nd place in Roller Coaster.
    • While we were calculating the final score, we realized that time doesn't matter nearly as much as the gap lengths
    • Lots of changes to do in 4 weekends. 
  • We got 3rd in Write It/Do It. 😒
    • We hadn't even used half the materials they had tested us on.
    • It was such a hard and confusing model!
Overall though, our team did pretty well. A few kids even got 1st in more than 1 event. The whole invitational was really good practice for the real thing and it was like a wake-up call for a lot of us. Bye all, I have to go back to studying...

Monday, February 5, 2018

FIVE Youtube Channels I Like



Hi! I feel like you guys and gals don't know enough about me... unless you stalk me of course.

**Inner Thoughts: Yup. Keep believing that people care enough about you to stalk you... maybe it will happen one day!**

I've decided to share five youtube channels I enjoy watching during my downtime and a little bit about each one:

  1. How to Hand Letter - Teaches how to do modern calligraphy with a variety of tools
  2. TED-Ed - Animated educational video (My favorite playlist is the one with all of the riddles!)
  3. Kurzgesagt-In a Nutshell - Similar to TED-Ed but more scientific and explanatory
  4. Vihart - Math that involves lots of inspiration and doodles!
  5. Crash Course - In-depth courses on a variety of subject with humor too! (Courses by the Green brothers are my personal favorite—especially John Green!)
Sidenote: These channels are in no particular order... All of them are equally awesome!

If you have some channels you think are good, please comment down below. Bye, see you all next week!