#dynamic planet

[d1-ryangosling-fan]

im literally so excited for science olympiad like im quivering shaking quaking and wtv else like oh my gosh the events this year are so hype im so giddy i cant wait to learn abt oceans and remote sensoring and neurons and stuff like im so excited

[narrator-scio-story]

Writing Science Olympiad Tests

If I’m not going to do the work I should be in terms of writing a novel about Science Olympiad, I should at least talk about my own experiences with Science Olympiad.

It’s still the beginning of the year, so at the moment, we’re still thinking about getting tests written, so we can trade the tests with other schools, so we can run tryouts and later have practices.

I am a bit fed up with the other team members already - even when it’s so early in the year - because some of them haven’t done their part of test writing. We don’t yet have a full set to trade, and I’ve had to make 2 tests for a couple of subjects so we can put them in captain’s tryouts.

Oh well, what can you do?

So by this point we’ve had our first meeting, but yeah, it’s all the behind the scenes stuff that’s really been concerning the officers. The tests I’ve written so far have been 1 thermodynamics test, 2 remote sensing tests, and 2 dynamic planet tests.

So there first test I wrote for each of those topics I spent quite a while on. My first dynamic planet and remote sensing tests, I actually wrote using last year’s rules rather than this year’s. I knew that not much would’ve changed between them, because the topics for each wouldn’t have changed. Dynamic planet is still about tectonics for the second year in a row, and remote sensing, it’s only in for 2 years at a time but when it is in they keep the same topics between the 2 years. So that was still climate change processes. Good for me, because that’s what I’m the best at!

So my first dynamic planet test I had multiple choice questions, matching, fill in the blank, short answer, and then questions with images or diagrams or whatever. Idk why I separated the last 2 sections, they probably could’ve gone together, but once I’d done that once it seemed automatic to do it on all the tests and now it’s just part of my formula or something.

Matching was one of the sections I found the easiest, because I could make part of it about vocab and just test a lot of basics that way, and then I made part of it about people and so got the history part of the rules out of the way.

Also, I deliberately included a female geologist in my matching about the history of plate tectonics. I felt I couldn’t do anything otherwise, it wasn’t fair.

Honestly, though, Inge Lehmann is pretty important. I don’t feel guilty about including her on the test, as though I only included her because she was female. I do wonder if perhaps we hear significantly less about her than about somebody who did something very similar - Andrija Mohorovicic, identified the boundary between the crust and the mantle, while Inge Lehmann discovered the inner core - because she was a woman, but I in no way feel as though asking people to know the discoverer of the inner core was too obscure or a stretch from the topic.

The other section I cared about a lot was the long answer or diagram or whatever you want to call it section, because there I was really trying to compensate for my past failures.

That was the point when I thought about how this test should be used for tryouts, because I was basically looking for a partner for myself.

I didn’t understand isostasy problems until halfway through last year, so there is a very long isostasy problem. I got questions about gravity anomalies wrong on last year’s Nats tests, so I’m testing this year’s students in the hope that won’t happen again. I don’t think I actually put any magnetic anomaly questions in that section, I guess because I couldn’t think of any questions that long to ask, but I did scatter several shorter questions about them throughout the test, because somehow last year I was confident they were on my notes sheet but they were not.

My process for the remote sensing test was similar, except that my remsen partner from last year helped judge my questions and suggest better questions and write the answer key - I know that they would’ve been willing to help me actually write the test as well but idk I just did a lot of the stuff before I was willing to share it with them.

Maybe I just don’t like sharing work. That’s not good, but it’s probably accurate.

My thermo test took a bit more effort because I know almost nothing about it yet so I was trying to learn as I worked. Also, that one I waited until this year’s rules manual came out, and then did it, so that want done until after the start of school.

I tried really hard to find a female scientist to put in that history section too, but I don’t know, I just couldn’t. I’ve gone through many articles on the history of thermodynamics, and tried everyone listed in the Wikipedia category of thermodynamicists, and been reduced to asking tumblr pages about women in science or just anyone I know who’s read about the topic.

It was such a depressing search.

Anyway, after that I wanted some tests to submit to a group exchange, we had to submit 2, so I remade a second remsen test by creating a duplicate of the one I had and then changing all the questions (it meant I already had a structure to build on, and could say, okay I need another question on that subject since I used that subject on the last test, idk I just felt like I could work faster like that). We submitted that, it got approved, and I also did the same thing with dynamic planet except I haven’t submitted that one. Reach of the second tests I managed in one afternoon of continual work, but there’s so much other work of classes and stuff I skipped.

And college apps, which make me miserable at the moment, I don’t know why.

Am I acting too much like everything is my responsibility? I keep trying to do stuff for Science Club because it feels like if I don’t, it doesn’t get done, and yet I make mistakes when I do things, and that’s just your dose of crazy self-doubt for today, and really I love SciOly very much even when it stresses me out, that’s why I do it.

[lexiferrising]

hey! i'm doing scioly dynamic planet at southern california competition next week and i was wondering if you had study tips for this particular topic? THANK YOU AND CONGRATS ON SIXTH <3

2. (omg wait, i’m doing geomapping as well that’s so weird) i would also appreciate study tips for geomapping because this is literally a yolo topic for me (i’m also an infj! coincidences haha)

i hope you don’t mind me answering these publicly, i don’t think links work very well over private answer :U

but ahhh thank you so much ;u; <33 and hmmm well for me, i did most of my studying from the two slideshows that are linked on the national site under dynamic planet (here it’ll be the ‘Glacial Erosion Slideshow’ links), they’re easy to understand and actually cover a lot of what i saw on my tests (difference glacier types, landforms made by them, etc). however all of the other links on there are pretty helpful as well! another piece of advice i would give is to know not only what landform is what, but to know what category the landforms fall under; depositional (like an esker or moraine), erosional (cirque or arete), glacial lakes and ponds (kettle lake, tarn, etc), or ice features (i didn’t see any of these on our test, but i believe valley glaciers and icefalls are examples). also, STUDY THOSE TOPO MAPS!! my partner and i had to read three on our test and discern how a glacier moved through the land/what features it left behind, and it was no walk in the park. i can almost guarantee you’ll see some of those if it’s a state/regional competition you’re competing in.

as for geomapping, i’m not sure what advice i can give for this one. :c there aren’t really any free resources on the national site yet because it’s a new event (my partner and i did the trial run of this event at states last year and it was waaaay different from how it is now, so i’m still adjusting to it as well), but i got a resource cd from my coach with a ton of helpful documents on it! i don’t know if you were distributed the same thing or not… O: there may be a way for me to transfer the .pdf files of them to you though, i could try putting them into a .zip file. but mostly it’s knowing a lot about the different kinds of fault structures in the earth (faults, strikes, folds, etc), as well as being able to look at a map of rock layers and ordering it from oldest to youngest. the law of superposition is your friend! also on one test we were required to draw a contour/elevation map, which i didn’t know how to do at the time, but since then i’ve found this handy guide that makes it easy to understand! (here!) topo maps are also used in this event, so definitely attack those and learn how to read/use them. c: i hope at least a little of this proves helpful to you, and good luck at your competition!! *u*

also dang, that’s a lot of coincidences right there O: but that’s awesome, not many people are infjs! we’re a very rare type apparently.