Some Changes in How Blogs are Scored in Experimenting Challenges

Here's a thought: ask people to indicate in the title what kind of blog they are writing. This would dictate how it would be scored. 

It is good idea. It also allow post blogs out of recommended order.

I do like the idea of nominating what sort of blog it is, but this also is not problem-free. If you've looked at my recent entries, I prioritised having a consistent posting cadence. As a result, early blogs were introductions/unboxing, but from there-on, blogs were a mixture because it was not possible to achieve everything necessary for a neat bundled posting within each week.

Now, if one must nominate just one type - I suspect nobody would choose to blog lower value types and instead will choose the higher ones. Because the higher value types generally need more work/time/results, I can foresee blogs being released in a "bunch" toward the end of the time frame because of this. Filming and editing video can take a while, for example, and experiments may require procuring unforeseen parts and building. This may make engagement tricky if all the content arrives at once.

Furthermore, the later the blog post is provided, the more time one potentially has to polish and improve it. Comparing earlier posts to later posts may not be favourable for the earlier poster.

But this also opens an interesting conundrum - blogs must also be numbered/ordered for the "blog 1s" to all be compared. If I were to follow traditional rules and go intro/unbox for my blog 1, then it seems likely a double-whammy effect may also occur on the bonus points where someone else's blog 1 is an experiment. Not only is it likely they will score higher on the base type score, the scope also leads to more potential content for which higher bonus points can be allocated. It also means competitors can see other people's already posted "blog 1s" and scale their efforts.

There may be no perfect scoring system - but I'm just voicing my thoughts out because any policy change (while very welcome as an attempt to improve the program) may have unintended side effects.

- Gough

It feels like there are two distinct elements to judging/scoring entries to challenges and competitions.  

The first is there should be a minimum quality level of posting to even get to the point where scores can be apportioned.  I may be sticking my neck out here to get my head chopped off, but I sometimes react with a “what?? Is that it?? Seriously??”  to some postings.  How are these even being lined up for prizes purely by default of numbers, e.g 5 prize winning positions with 6 entries of mediocre or no value.

The second is awarding those contributions that have been filtered for a base level of quality.  Giving them points based on quality of response referenced against the goal of the challenge, along the lines you mention.  

I definitely think there should be a minimum standard to achieve to even get to the point-scoring start point.  It would require more upfront information to be provided for the challenge so it is clear on expectations.

Interesting modification... I only wonder if it doesn't prevent people from publishing traditional unboxing/kit content information? I can imagine the series of experiment/tutorial type blogs with very limited information about kit components. That could of course be compensated by final blog judging guidelines (e.g. kit content information needs to be included to get good final score)

Its worth a shot.  If it doesnt work the way intended,  something was learned for the next go round. 

And another thing - does it means that final blog will not be a sum of extra credit blogs? I think that writing - for example - a tutorial could require extra effort not always advancing the main story of final blog (and in some cases not easily integrated into final blog)... [EDIT] I think that it could be a better approach from reader's perspective to get more different reading material during the contest

BTW - from my perspective - some sort of judging results summary would be very nice (something like anniel747 have published - but maybe anonymized/aggregated between all judges). I understand that judges are very busy, time for scoring is short and maybe detailed scoring is not always present or generated using different criteria sets  (thus not easy to summarize), but I think that it would be very interesting to the challenger in the long-term perspective (what was considered ok and - especially - what aspects were below expectations)

I definitely would not volunteer to judge in that case. It's difficult enough, let alone having to then inevitably justify to the world.

Besides, comments are provided, and they are used in the summaries of all the project for all the competitions as far as I'm aware. 

People often ask for advice about competitions (and applications) and as far as I can tell, it is always given by plenty of people. 

Some publicly ask for 1:1 help offline, which too is fine, but few of those make the effort to follow up on it. 

Maybe it could be modified to (say):

A blog that contains a decent unboxing or detailed photographs will get 20 points.
A blog that contains a deep-dive into the components will get 20 points.
A blog that contain a fair amount of information towards an actual experiment will get 20 points.
A blog that significantly helps newcomers to work with the technology will get 20 points.
A blog that contains a good quality video will get 20 points.

That way, there becomes a new element of judging beyond a fixed score, but only slightly, and only hinting at applications or tutorials as example ways of scoring. If two blogs contain good quality videos, then only one 20 points overall are awarded for instance, and if someone writes less than 5 blogs, they could still pick up more than 20 points.

If it was like that, then if someone writes a blog then if it meets the competition criteria then it would be accepted regardless of a fixed type, allowing the contestants to continue writing what they find interesting or what the did, in their own way, and scored at a "almost" near-fixed value so that there's not the stress of having to write specific content, and the scoring doesn't need to go into significant effort levels either.

There will always be contestants who will try to game any system (e.g. there are those who submit on the last day, presumably to prevent others from copying). If the readers do not like certain content e.g. copied content or empty blogs, they will voice their opinions in the comments anyway, since no-one likes it when someone tries to bend the rules. That's the check and the balance will come when they realize that doesn't work with the final blog post.

The incremental change could have the benefit that there's less risk of reduced quality content if, with a bigger change, people shift to writing precisely what will be scored versus what they actually would like to do toward the challenge during their five weeks or so. It would be nice to have the spirit of being in a virtual lab with your goggles on when reading people's blogs.

Besides, anyone who doesn't bother to write five decent blog posts won't be able to formulate a decent final blog post (because the previous 5 help gather one's thoughts into an organized blog, rather than emit verbal diarhoea in the final blog which won't win the highest prizes compared to organized content.

The whole experience is supposed to be fun for everyone, that should include the organizers, the contestants and the judging. While prizes are nice to have, in reality if you think you'll get a kick out of experimenting with some cool parts that you'll get for free, and you think you'll have a bit of time to share what you find with your peers in interesting blogs, then those are going to be the fun blogs to read. Magnetics is such an intriguing topic, I'm dying to read all the cool things peoole will discover in the Flyback transformers challenge.