Hello parents, teams, and coaches!
The USAT team hopes you had a wonderful return to the competition on Friday. The program benefits from feedback, but did you know that having your students reflect on how the Meet went as a group can be a powerful team-building tool? If you are looking for something to do at your next practice, here are a few questions that you can use at any time to get the conversation going about Mind Sprint challenges.
- Describe Mind Sprints you’ve done before.
- If you could change any of the rules from a Mind Sprint you did, what would you change?
- What skills did someone need in order to do well in each Mind Sprint?
- Did any of the challenges remind you of things you’ve done before?
- If you could design your own Mind Sprint challenge, what would it be? How would you want to score it?
- DIVE DEEPER: Why not give it a try? Give your students 30 minutes to design a Mind Sprint of their own. They may not finish, but it’s fun to think about how to design one!
Do you have anything you want the USAT staff to know about Round Robin 1? Leave us a comment or email us at sarah@usacademictraithlon.com.
usacademictriathlon.com 
I was a judge for Mind Sprint 2 which referred to the SCAMPER technique but did not define it. Some students were familiar with it, while others were not. The SCAMPER technique should either be defined or not mentioned.
Thank you for your comment. We’ve defined it so many times in the program and on our website, I did not realize this would be a problem. In that Mind Sprint, the students did not need to actually use that method, it guided how the prompts were created, so hopefully it didn’t affect their performance in the Mind Sprint. All teams are welcome to have the SCAMPER sheet in their Competition Kits, and you can find that on our Hosting a Meet/Downloads page. If you would like more detailed information on the SCAMPER method, this blog post has links to the whole series of posts on the subject: https://usacademictriathlon.com/category/resources/scamper-technique/