Tag Archives: fun

Designing Great Competitions

Last weekend, I volunteered for the fifth time with the Blue Lobster Bowl, the National Ocean Sciences Bowl regional competition for the Massachusetts region. My main role was as a moderator, reading questions quickly and clearly for my seventh year since competing myself back in high school. But this year, I also played another role behind the scenes, working with the regional coordinator to automatically post results to a partially published Google spreadsheet. Now teams (and anyone else!) could follow along real-time with how each division was going.

My presentation of the standings after the Round Robin portion of the 2017 Blue Lobster Bowl. This year, we gave everyone access to a Google spreadsheet with this information, updated throughout the day.

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Welcome to the Golden Age of Board Games

Around three years ago, I wrote one of my most read answers on Quora to the question, “What are some of the best strategy games out there?” A few weeks later, Helena Zhang, a friend of mine from Caltech and fellow officer in our MIT grad dorm, invited me to join a board game group she had started with some labmates. Our group came to be known as “Fun and Games” and started spreading through our social circles, and in particular to the Singaporean community at MIT.

That fall, a new Singaporean grad student started coming to our group regularly. I had met her previously through the Graduate Christian Fellowship and we played on the same team together (playing 7 Wonders) her first visit to our group. Little did I know at the time, those would be the first couple steps on a journey that would lead to us getting married last June, with the Fun and Games group helping to make most of our awesome board game-themed centerpieces:

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