Another year, another fantastic Madness! Poetry tournament is in the books! Here’s a brief recap of the event:
A New Champion
Again, as has happened every year (except the first year, when it was impossible), this year’s champion was a past non-winner who decided to give it another go … and swept her way through six rounds to the championship! I’m talking about Amelia Shearer, who dazzled students and fellow authletes with her wordplay throughout the event. My personal favorite was her Round 4 poem The Rules of Poetry …, which propelled her into the Final Four, after which she went on to defeat two very tough poets (Laura Purdie Salas and William Peery) to win the championship and possession of the Thinkier trophy. Congratulations, Amelia! Here’s a view of the complete bracket — which links you to the Bracket page (desktop only), from which you can click to view any matchup you want!
A Stable Platform
For those who remember, the early years of the event were very … manual. Every poem was submitted manually via email. Every matchup page was posted manually. Every poll was opened and closed manually. And on top of that the site would repeatedly crash at the end of close matches — it was crazy! So last year, I moved everything from Think, Kid, Think! to a dedicated site, which helped automate a lot of those manual steps, and everything worked much more automatically — except the new app still crashed far too often, and for even longer stretches of time than before! Well, I am happy to say that in 2018 everything ran extremely smoothly! Our users caught a few bugs here and there that were quickly fixed, but we had zero downtime during the event. Now I can focus on adding more fun features instead of just keeping the lights on. Yay!
Ups and Downs
I’ve been tracking participation closely since the event’s inception. It’s tough to make apples to apples comparisons since so much about the event changes every year, but a few things are straightforward to see:
- Authlete participation remains as strong as ever. We continue to get a good mix of new (and talented!) applicants and repeat applicants. It’s especially great to see former authletes rejoin the event after a few years sitting it out. The Authletes who participated this year also voted at a higher rate than ever. Though our goal is of course 100% of authletes voting in 100% of matchups, this year’s average of 57.1 authlete votes per match across all rounds was the highest in Madness! history, and continues our steady upward trend since the authlete vote was introduced in 2014.
- Our community continues to grow — this year saw over 4,200 comments, a 40% increase over last year. Community voting held steady (despite adding an extra layer of security — email verification) to the registration process. However, at only 72.4 community votes per match, we still need to find ways to spread the word to a wider audience.
- Our classroom voting was unfortunately down quite a bit vs. 2017. Some of this is attributable to the horrid weather that resulted in snow days during several rounds, but still, the 20% drop in classroom votes was disheartening. If there is a single thing I can ask of everyone reading this post, it is to help drive teacher/classroom registration in 2019. We can easily support 10x — 100x! — the number of classrooms that we have now. It’s just a matter of increasing awareness and potentially adding some incentive to join. I’m open to all ideas!
The New Rules Rule
We made two significant changes to the rules this year: 1) both authletes in a given matchup receive the same word, and 2) the winner of the matchup is now determined by a weighted blend of all three voting categories. I think both of these changes worked out spectacularly well, and based on comments both on the site and in various back channels, it seems that most of this year’s participants agree.
What’s Next?
In terms of the event itself, I’ll continue to improve the site experience to make it that much easier for people to participate in and follow the event. I am also considering opening up what is currently the Authlete Vote to include all past authletes as well as current authletes, or even expanding the category to include other highly-regarded people in the industry (editors, agents, academics, etc.). I welcome all feedback on this idea or anything else about the event to improve the experience for all.
Beyond the event, I also have a few other ideas for how to keep the Madness! community alive during non-tournament time (let’s call that May through January). I’ll road test those as time allows later this year.
For now, I’ll end by saying THANK YOU for following both TKT and Madness! Poetry! Get ready for me to start posting a bit more frequently and casually here at TKT, whether it’s new poems, discussion starters, opinions on industry news, or whatever else.
Bye for now!
-Ed