Anticipate having teams sign up on event day. Every year this event has captured the attention and curiosity of families and groups of friends wandering the Science Rendezvous event. One year, a family of 5 who randomly stopped by to talk to me at the Science Chase Headquarters while attending Science Rendezvous, decided to participate. They were very surprised when they came back to awards ceremony just for fun, and won first prize! (You will need a decent set of surround sound speakers 😉 )

Weather

Will your event be affected by the weather? You need to plan for both perfect sunny weather and awful rainy weather. Either are possible. If you are caught off-guard by rain, you may be forced to cancel the entire event. In the ideal world, you can arrange two sites for each challenge – one outside and one inside, and use whichever is appropriate on event day. A more easily-achieved compromise could be to keep three challenges inside, and two or three outside. The outside few could have alternative locations, or if that is not possible for any reason, the inside three could become a shortened version of the full event, if necessary.

Sequential Challenges

The easiest manner to organize a series of challenge events is sequentially. Every team starts at SCHQ, gets briefed on the storyline, sets out to complete challenge 1, is led to challenge 2, completes challenge 2 and finds/observes a clue to challenge 3 and so forth. This simplifies planning because the storyline is the same for every group and you can generally track the flow of participants. I have found this preferable.

This form of event requires you to stagger the start times of each team throughout the day. How long you separate the start of the team should be defined by how long you anticipate the first challenge will take, and the need to avoid the next team from arriving while the first team is still working on the challenge. This timed start should be reflected if you use an online registration system. In this case, it is helpful to have participants select a specific or approximate start time for their “race”.

Non-Sequential Challenges

Another possibility is that the challenges can be completed in any sequence. This is a flexible approach that could help start the event quickly (and provide more of a “race” feel)! Five teams could start at once, each heading off to find a different challenge location. From there, the clues could be arranged so that each team either rotates around the next set of challenges (effectively in sequence thereafter), or can proceed to any site randomly. I suggest against allowing teams to move arbitrarily from site to site, as it risks too many teams arriving at once, by chance. This is logistically difficult to accommodate, however the event is set up. The best strategy is to avoid having more than one team in need of a challenge location at each given time. Therein lays an important key to a successful event!

Timing

Consider how long the entire event should take. This should be somewhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours. I’ve found that teams spend more time moving from one location to the next than I expect! The Science Chase shouldn’t take up the entire afternoon. People want to see the rest of Science Rendezvous too! Finding the balance that works for you will depend on your site’s circumstances (size, resources, how long you think attendees will stay at each part of your event).

Planning for your event should include a system of tracking the teams through the Science Chase event, at least in a rough sense. At minimum you’ll need to record the start time and finish time of each team as they depart and arrive back safely at the Science Chase Headquarters. It is also a good idea for you to track any delays along the route that weren’t the team’s fault. Unless you have very low rates of participation, it could happen that a team gets “stuck” on a challenge. This is ok, it separates the prize-winning teams from those that don’t. But, if a team takes considerably longer than expected to finish the next team may arrive and have to wait (unfairly contributing to their time.) More precisely, the second team would be limited in its advantage over the first team to the time initially separating their start. As the range of overall times tends to vary considerably more than the difference between the first and last team, it is clear that the impact of having a slow team ahead of a good team would render the competition clearly unfair.  Tracking delays could be done in a variety of ways.

You could have given them a Science Chase ID card with names on one side (printed if they signed up online ahead of time or written if they sign-up on event day) at the start of their Science Chase. On the backside you could have spaces for each of the challenges, and have your volunteers mark delay times along with their signature. Another possibility would be to have one of the two volunteers at each site call SCHQ and report delays if they happen. While more work, this solves the problem of potential forging of some ID card.

Every time I’ve organized this event, a few teams ask if they can participate without competing. That’s great! Less time keeping and more exploration of science and engineering. I am convinced, nonetheless, that having a competitive aspect to this event helps drive the experience forward in a useful and fun way.

Helping Participants

The story-experience makes the Science Chase unique. It also complicates your interaction with the participants. When constructing a technical challenge, stay aware of how much knowledge you assume they will have. Consider whether a thoughtful team could solve the challenge with intuition and experimentation. Strictly speaking, you and the volunteers running the event do not tell the participants how to build or solve the answer! The Science Chase is about discovery. That said, there are plenty of ways that you can “stay in character” while allowing volunteers to push the participants along in the right direction (i.e. a former lab assistant remembering something that might help…). Be careful about giving too much away – it is a race, after all! Be very clear with your volunteers and yourselves how much information you think your participants need to solve the challenge fairly, and stay consistent between teams.

Inspiration

While any new group creating their own Science Chase will have their own ideas and inspiration, it seemed worth noting previous organizers have been inspired by:

• Labs performed as an undergraduate or graduate student that were particularly interesting
• Mythbusters
• Amazing Race
• Universal Studios
• Video Games generally
• Adventure movies with problem solving puzzles
  • Indiana Jones
  • Tomb Raider
  • National Treasure
  • The Sandlot