Today We Bring You The Results Of The SteemSTEM Writing Competition!
[Join us on #steemSTEM]
One of the goals of the SteemSTEM project is to promote learning. The best way to learn about a topic is often to teach it to others! Steem and Steemit provide us with the unique opportunity to get rewarded for such efforts, and the SteemSTEM initiative affords us the opportunity to further reward the best contributions!
What Were The Potential Prizes?
- 1st Place - 100 Steem Power + 4.224 STEEM (reward from the value of the announcement post)
- 2nd Place - 50 Steem Power + 4.224 STEEM (reward from the value of the announcement post)
- 3rd Place - 25 Steem Power + 4.224 STEEM (reward from the value of the announcement post)
The top three posts were re-steemed in addition to the bonus monetary prize.
As an extra thank you to all of those who participated, we are awarding a 5 Steem Power bonus to all runner up submissions. We appreciate all of your hard work creating these posts and thank you for the diverse sample of topics.
Reviewing How Judging and Ranking Was Performed
Three members of the SteemSTEM team, @anarchyhasnogods, @lemouth, and @justtryme90 were responsible for judging the posts.
We assigned each submitted post a score based on 4 guidelines.
- Accuracy - 15 pts
- Comprehensibility - 15 pts
- Formatting - 5 pts
- Appropriate citations and references - 5 pts
Accuracy
We will check for the scientific accuracy of your post. Remember that spreading inaccurate and/or false information leads to confusion for your readers!
Comprehensibility
We will rate on how easy it is to read and understand the text. Garbled text or text that is too technical can be hard to understand. Good scientific writing makes even complex topics seem simple.
Formatting
We will rate the post on how good it looks. People notice the formatting before the text. Large solid blocks of text are difficult to read and concentrate on, no matter the comprehensibility of the text. We are not looking for advanced formatting techniques, just basic, solid formatting.
Citations
Just citing your sources isn’t always enough. Listing the sources below the block of text you used them in can make it easier to follow what you got from where. The goal of citing information is not just to give credits, it also serves as a way for your readers to learn more if they are interested.
Remember science is a discipline focused on learning and discovery, we should all work to help others achieve that when they read what we write.
The Results
The Top Three Posts
First Place
NASA Disasters Re-examined: Part II by @vir
What we thought: This was a fantastic post. The writing was very clear and engaging. The information was presented in a very clear manner. The formatting was visually appealing and allowed for a great flow when reading the material. Finally the number, quality and style of cited materials throughout the text was all extremely well done, and could serve as a reference for others to follow in their own posts.
Second Place
Wild rabbit: the Ecosystem Engineer by @rmach
What we thought: This was very engaging post. The writing is very clear and the information factual and well supported. The images and incorporated videos really aided in the ease of digesting the information and truly complemented the text. The information is also very well cited, though not as easy to access due to a lack of direct links.
Third Place
How Image Recognition Works - Part 1: Basics and Perceptrons by @sykochica
What we thought: This was a very interesting post! As with the top two submissions the writing in this post is exceptional and the information factual and well supported. The images and gifs really helped in understanding the process behind image recognition.
Runners Up Submissions
(by alphabetical order)
| Author | Post Title |
|---|---|
| ............................... | .................................................................................................. |
| @giantbear | Ants The Most Successful Species On Earth |
| @jaki01 | Baby With Three Parents |
| @norbu | Biologists Develop First Semi Synthetic Single Celled Organism Using Lab Made DNA |
| @meetsin | Cryptococcus |
| @a-condor | How Much Do You Know About Your Blood?! |
| @norbu | Is Our Universe A Vast And Complex Hologram? New Research Thinks So! |
| @meesterboom | Is Our Universe One Gigantic Hologram? |
| @tfeldman | Osteopathic Insight New Harvard Study Suggests That Mechanical Stimulation Alone Leads To Muscle Regeneration |
| @liliana.duarte | Plants Are Better Learners Then You Might Think |
| @the-explorer | Scleroderma, The Rare Potential Human Wrecker |
We @steemstem thank all of you for participating and wish congratulations to the winners!
Considering the success of this contest we will plan to do another in the near future. Please be on the lookout for the next contest opportunity
Thank you for your support of the @steemstem project and your enthusiasm for creating and reading great STEM content on steemit.
This is such a great initiative and will have to look at all these authors now. Thanks a bunch for the hard work focussed on quality, integrity and education. All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
They indeed all deserve to be followed! :)
Great! I wrote about something I like and ended up winning the silver medal!
: ) I learned with all the posts. Cool competition.
Thanks to you for participating! :)
Thanks guys! Nice work, and appreciate the 5 steem! Congrats to all the winners! Just out of curiosity, in the original post I believed you said you would give us a score to see where we could improve in certain areas. Curious to know where I need the most work! Thanks.
Average Scores From The Three Sets of Votes:
Accuracy 13.66/15
Comprehensibility 13/15
Formatting 3.5/5
Citations 3.16/5
Summary of (some of the) Comments By Reviewers: Good and informative post. Formatting needs a bit of work, too much boldface/large text. Citations could be better organized.
My personal suggestion: Take a look at the post submitted by @vir and how he handled citing the material. That makes everything so easy to access and made it really easy for me to read a bit more into things.
To be honest, @vir crafted a better organized and cited post then I have ever done, even I am going to be using that one as a reference going forward.
If only I could show my tenth grade english teacher what you wrote about me. Take that Mr. Karcher!
For those curious, this is the code I use to create my citation links:
<sup>[[1]](https://www.nasa.gov/)</sup>And I think you do a great job on your posts @justtryme90! Even better, you have so many interesting topics you write about.
I appreciate the compliment, will use your citation code for my future posts, and thank you for showing me what a great post looks like! :)
Thank you @vir, I look forward to your next post!
Congrats @vir !
Concerning the citations actually I did a similar thing but with additional square brackets like in your citations it looks even better (not so hidden in the text) indeed.
That feedback about citations is really helpful. I've been reluctant to even fool with any "real science" posts, just because citations seem like they would be off-putting to include in journal form. Did you actually check each citation to determine accuracy, though? It seems like that would be a lot of effort for judging. And it would be easy to cite "alt facts" when a cite to a poor source looks like a legitimate citation (just a superscript numeral). Should we list the cited sources at the end of the article, so at least folks can see whether those sources have any credibility. No knock on the post by @vir at all, not at all. Just a process question for future posts. Thanks.
We did the best we could with that regard. Did I read every cited article in detail? No. Did I look at the cited material? Yes. And yeah judging took me quite a few hours (which is a lot for only 13 posts.) :)
I was lenient with "accuracy" to mean accurate to the citations. I thought these posts were all pretty good in the accuracy department.
I have put together a new post for today where I used vir's method and also included a list at the end for exactly your reason. Ease of seeing what the citation is, at the same time as placing the material in the text like vir did so it's right there in a professional manner.
I was definitely empathizing with your challenge in the SteemSTEM curation and contest judging! Having that list will make it easier to see if a reference is to some Alex Jones-type stuff or something more legitimate.
Oh for sure! Appreciate the feedback. I will take a look at that post.
The citation was indeed the common issue with many posts. Thank you for participating!
Thanks for the feedback. Impressed with this contest
No problem, yeah we ended up holding back posting everyone's scores. The scores should IMO be private unless requested like you did. All participants should come and discuss them with us in the #steemSTEM room on steemit.chat, unless they want the scores revealed in public in the open. That way we could further keep things private by direct messaging each person with the info.
Thank you! I love science! 😂 You will be seeing a lot more of me here! Thank you for your hard work.
Thanks to you for participating!
I enjoyed entering this. It was a pleasant change from my normal stuff. I do like the steemstem posts and was pleased to participate!!
I also enjoyed reading your post (and commenting it) ;)
What a surprise when I logged in to Steem today. Thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate what @steemstem and the people behind it are doing. Now to catch up on the other entries.
Congratulations to you! You deserve it! :)
Congrads to all
great work guys!
I never heard of it :-(
I would have joined with my geeky account @cryptohazard
We are planning the next one, so stay tuned! We will hopefully fine tune what we are going to do with it over the next week or two and then announce. I hope you will participate then :)
thanks for the info
yo its started again btw
Keep up the great work in building a thriving STEM community on Steemit :)
Thanks @liberosist. We are dedicated to doing just that! It's not going to build it self over night, and will require a lot of effort but I think the end result will be a fun and informative experience for all of us.
Looks like great picks from the first few! Will be reading through all of them tonight :)
Thank you @kevinwong, I hope you enjoyed your reading. People submitted some really nice stuff!
interessante eu estou aprendendo muito com as postagem da galera de steemit