Sunday March 12, 2006

We left in the morning for the NAS, stopping on the way for photos on the Capitol steps and with the big statue of Einstein. From 9 AM until noon was set aside for judging at the projects--the public wasn't allowed in yet. This was probably the "fuzziest" part of judging in my mind before arriving, and there's a lot of variation in how it works.

The judges do have a chance to look over your project board the night before, and they know your paper well. Some judges walked up to students and asked for a brief explanation of the project; for this reason it's probably a good idea to have a rough outline of such an explanation prepared.

My three ``primary judges'' (the ones assigned to talk to me during this period) were the two math judges and the computer science judge, which I had expected. One judge pointed out a small error on my poster and then suggested a problem I might consider to extend my research. Another was more focused on what I'd done since applying (which wasn't much, or really anything). The last asked a bit about applications of the games I'd studied, and gave me a few reasoning problems to follow up on what he'd asked during an interview. The common denominator, though, was the question ``What's with the blocks?''

My block-based EF game. (Photo by Adam Solomon)

You see, the night before leaving for the STI, I panicked and decided that I absolutely needed a better way to explain ``EF games'' to people than the pictures on my poster. So I wracked my brain a bit and around 5 or 6 PM, headed out to the toy store to buy... blocks. I also picked up some colored poster board and double-sided tape, and after a few hours of construction had a far better and more intuitive way to explain the logic game my project dealt with. Now it actually made sense, for instance, to my parents, and I hoped that I'd be able to keep just about anyone's attention long enough to teach him to play. This was the one thing I was pretty certain I had done well on. So I enjoyed showing off my little game for the judges, and didn't have to answer many hard or embarrassing questions. (E.g. ``You know that's false, right?'' That is not a fun question.)

My judging was all over by about 9:30, so I had some time to relax by my project before the flood of visitors poured in. After lunch, the public exhibition of projects started. It was exciting to get to talk to so many people, but it was also absolutely exhausting, even just for three hours! And hot, in a suit!

A bird's-eye view of the projects at NAS. (Photo by Feature Photo Service)

One of the more interesting characters I encountered was hell-bent on the idea of doing Sudoku puzzles in color. He even gave me a color puzzle he'd created, clipped out of the Suduko newsletter. Apparently he comes down from New York every year just to see the STS projects--I was pretty surprised, as well as honored. I must have talked with this guy for a half hour--he thought that my project must have to do with Sudoku, because Sudoku is a game, and my project deals with games. So we had a long discussion about whether it would be easier to do Sudoku puzzles with colors or numbers. (The chief considerations: it's easier to ``scan'' for a color, but there's no clear, standard listing mechanism.) We also discussed how we might design an experiment to test which is easier. Fortunately for me, I got some credit for having this conversation while everyone else got to relax a bit as traffic died down, since one of the judges listened in to part of it. Maybe I got brownie points for patience or experiment design; I don't know, but at least I felt like I'd redeemed myself from some of my interview failures.

In the evening, we unwound by going bowling. It was a pretty fancy place; I had to borrow a shirt from Minh to be allowed in. We bonded very much, mainly by being dead tired and learning that almost no one there was much good at bowling.

John celebrates and Brittany gets ready to bowl. (Photo by Kate Lowry)