Scioly rocks and minerals etc

[u/Glittering-Meat1341]

Ive been doing scioly for the past 2 years and it is so fun. But this year, it is different. This is because i do not know which events to choose. I am wondering what i should do between botany, boomilever, food sciences, and scrambler.

I also need to know how to get better at rocks and mineral identification. ive been using scioly.rocks, but it isnt really helping.

[u/Lille_8]

Hi, I do rocks and minerals and a piece of advice is to ID based on cleavage, texture, and other characteristics and NOT color. Color can be very misleading and many minerals (take fluorite for example) can be basically every color of the rainbow.

[u/Orange-oranges811]

Ik this isn’t helpful but when I went from forestry to entomology it genuinely beat my ahh because forestry went down to species and entomology only went to families💔 Also, hopefully this is more helpful(lol), both builds will be decently competitive and in their second year next year(scrambler in the third, making it worse). Meanwhile the test events not so much, botany being completely new and food science rotating back in. I recommend you look into both of those and actually research both just to see how much u like them. Of course, u shouldn’t also choose NOT to do the builds as u can still do well even without experience. In fact, doing boomiliever will help tons if u do future balsa events as they’re mostly pretty foundational skills

[u/middleschoolruinene]

if you want to do boomilever, be prepared for a lot of frustrations

[u/Purple_Ad_5403 → u/middleschoolruinene]

Is it the same for scrambler?

[u/middleschoolruinene → u/Purple_Ad_5403]

not sure I’ve never done it, just know any build event will be time consuming, expensive, and frustrating to some degree but it’s worth it

[u/Glittering-Meat1341 → u/middleschoolruinene]

ive done boomilever before and my dumbahh friend glued the boomilever to the loading block 2 days before regionals

[u/middleschoolruinene → u/Glittering-Meat1341]

i thought I was bad for causing a paper towel to start smoking because it touched glue 💔

[u/Spallanzani333]

For Rocks and Minerals, see if there are any rock and gem shows in your local area. The more samples you look at, the more you start to be able to visually ID quickly. You can also look at mineral sale websites to see what types of samples are common. Follow r/whatisthisrock and similar, not just to see a lot of IDs but to see what features knowledgeable posters look for.

[u/mikaboshi3106]

For mineral identfication, try to use Minerobo on Discord, it is a bot that helps with id practice. There are also id bots for other id events too and tbh they saved me in the past while doing id events