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All that the rules say is
"... containing the mass of the tower, the mass
supported by each tower and the design changes made after
previous tests."
No further guidance is offered to students, judges, or
coaches, neither on
format nor content. The good news is that, in my experience,
ties are rare
in this event, so the logs will seldom have any affect on
the ranking of
teams. In fact, the only consequence for not submitting a
log is that you
automatically lose a tie; failure to submit a log does not
bounce you into
the second scoring tier. How an individual judge views the
logs is his
choice, so if you're worried about the log as a scoring
element, you should
find this person and ask. He (or she, of course) may prefer
more trials
over fewer trials, or he may prefer lots of observations
over a simple
record of masses. He may want it handwritten and neat in a
bound lab
notebook, or he may want it printed from a word-processor.
He may want some
similarity between your last entry and the tower that you
brought for
competition. He may want a polka-dot cover sheet.
The rule was a well-intended effort to get kids to be
systematic about
developing their tower design. The rules in Div. B bridges
are identical,
so the same logic applies in that event. I believe that
systematic design
in these events means that you take a rational design,
possibly from a
statics design, computer simulation, or observations of
existing
structures, build a model, try it, document the performance
and failures,
including construction techniques, change something and
repeat the cycle.
The documentation could be brief or it could be elaborate.
Include
everything that you think is important. The point is that
the log should be
useful (and instructive) for your students. For my kids, in
previous years,
I've had them record tower masses and masses held on a
standard scoresheet
(from the soinc.org site), and make sketches and record wood
sizes and
densities in the margins of the scoresheets. It wasn't so
presentable, but
it helped us track our progress.
I presented Bridge Building at the Hammond Clinic, and I
gave the
participants a suggested log format which included making a
sketch,
recording wood sizes and densities and masses of various
subassemblies,
mass of the structure and mass supported, observations about
how, where,
and why the structures failed, and a place to make a
suggestion for
improvement on the next trial. The format required at least
one page per
trial, not a summary listing of results. However, nothing in
that format
was in the rules; it was a reasonable starting point for
making logs.
Basically, you and your students should create a consistent
log format
which helps you capture the data and ideas that you need.
Think of it as a
lab notebook.
Beyond that, there isn't any definition of the practice log.
It probably
should not have a role in the scoring, since the rules
writers didn't
define it in any detail. They can work on that for next
year.
Bob Monetza
Grand Haven, MI
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