Our HS Science Olympiad Invitational was yesterday, and I pulled my Remote Sensing event off. In some ways this year was better than others, in that I felt that my questions were structured with more thought as to what I really expected them to know.

I learned some stuff while grading the responses, particularly to anticipate that someone might me helping me score the event. I actually had a key that let me use the two parents who showed up unexpectedly, which was good. Among my lessons learned was the realization that if I'm having the students 'estimate' an answer, I need to think about what the reasonable range of answers should be. Based on my working the problem beforehand (a lessoned learned from previous experiences!) I had established what I thought was a reasonable range, but looking that the student answers, next time I'll base it on percentage and put the range in the key. I wound up rescoring several parts of the tests after my volunteers had left, because I felt that my original criteria was too tight.

A major impact on the test creation was that I was called into a sub job unexpectedly on Thursday so I didn't have that day to finish things up. Then, Friday night, when I finally got to pick the test up again to finish pulling it together, it dawned on me that I was basically rewriting the same event as I had created three years ago. Well, that would be fine, except that two of my current team had been there and would possibly be more familiar with the material (always a concern when I'm responsible for the event).

So, at 10 o'clock at night, I find myself having to completely redirect my efforts, after having taken two weeks to pull my background material together for the other approach. It came together, but was not as polished as I would have liked. But independent of how I thought it came off, my students told me that they felt it was a better event than the one from the Invitational that they'd attended two weeks ago.

At least, I'm not responsible for creating the event for the Regionals next month. That's when it really gets to be a balancing act, to help my team prepare for an event that I'm creating and still be fair to the other teams.

The other things I learned were more specific to how to present the questions, and my team *will* have the advantage of discussing that with them when we meet over the next few weeks. And it's fun to be back. I've missed working with the kids this last fall.