Make and Deploy a Regular Tournament - | How do students participate? | Viewing Progress of Tournament

MrNussbaum.com Premium allows teachers to use any of the 18 available games in interclass or intraclass tournaments. The tournaments allow for any number of students to participate (must be more than 1), and works somewhat like an NCAA tournament. The tournament is conducted completely online and is dynamically updated when each participant registers a score while logged in and playing the game in the tournaments section. Students who have a higher score in their initial matchup (round 1) will move on to later rounds. This section is devoted to intraclass (regular) tournaments whereas the next section deals with interclass (Global) tournaments.

Making/Deploying a Regular Tournament

To create a regular tournament, teachers must click on the "Regular Tournament" tab in the control menu. Scroll to the section of the page under the heading "Register New Regular Tournament". Simply fill in a name for the tournament, indicate the number of students, select the game in which you would like students to compete, and click "submit". You will notice there is a menu that reads "category (Speed Math Only)". If you register a tournament using the game Speed Math, you can indicate what operation (+, -, x, /) students should compete in. Scores will not be recorded in the tournament if students participating in the tournament select a different operation than the one specified by the teacher. If you are not registering a Speed Math tournament, ignore this menu. See picture below.

Upon clicking "submit," your tournament is registered but not deployed. It should appear in the "My Registered Tournaments" section at the top of the page. Now, it is time to select what students will be participating in the tournament. A list of your students should have appeared. You can select all of the students to participate, or, select individual students to participate. When you have finished selecting students, select the tournament you just registered from the "undeployed tournaments" menu. Next, click "Deploy" and your tournament will be ready. All match-ups are randomly generated. It is important to note, that students may receive "a buy" or free pass to a later round if an odd number of participants are playing.

How do Students Participate?

First, the student must log in as a school user and then click "Regular Tournaments" from the control menu. The deployed tournaments will be listed on the top of the page under the heading "Regular Tournaments". Other information such as opponent, time and date the game was played, and status (eliminated or alive) can be found here also. The next section reads "Play in Regular Tournaments". There will be a drop-down menu with all deployed tournaments available to be played. It is important to remember that tournament scores will only be recorded if the student has accessed the game from the tournaments page. The student should select the appropriate tournament and play. See the picture below.

Viewing the Progress of the Tournament

When the student is finished playing, the game score will automatically be recorded in the tournament. After playing the game, the student will be re-directed back to the tournament section. Students can view the progress of the tournament and see how everyone else is doing by scrolling to the bottom of the page and selecting the tournament from the menu under the "View Deployed Tournament Status" section (see below). If the student's opponent has already played, he or she can immediately find out if they have been eliminated by viewing the score section of the "Regular Tournaments" section at the top of the page. The status message will be in boldface.

* Skipping Students

Sometimes circumstances prevent a particular student from playing in a tournament, which in turn, can prevent the tournament from progressing to later rounds. From the teacher panel, you can enter a score based on your discretion for any student participating in a tournament. Simply scroll to "View Deployed Tournament Status" and select the tournament you wish to enter scores for. You will see text boxes next to each student. Enter the score for the desired student and click "submit". The score for the selected student will be registered.

Students with higher scores than their opponent will progress to the next round. To play in the next round, the student simply repeats the same steps as playing the first round. The chosen game will be available again in the "Play in a Regular Tournament" section. The option will be unavailable for students who had lower scores than their opponent. It is important to note, that NO student can progress to a later round until all games have been played by all participants in the previous round.