As a former student that competed in both National and State TSA events from 2006 to 2012 (and won multiple trophies across events including the "webmaster" competition) I'm not really surprised by this outcome. That doesn't mean that its the right outcome but just a result of how these competitions are run.
The judges are all volunteers that may or may not have a background in the actual event they are there to grade. So you get someone that just shows up, reads the rules for the event and then judges accordingly to those exact rules. Which in this case since the website is hosted by Github it automatically gets disqualified for not meeting the rules of the event. This is a pretty easy thing to fix which is either A) Just have a custom domain that hides the github hostname B) host it somewhere else. The students here seem to have taken the B approach and have it up on netlify now.
I certainly empathize with the students here putting hard work into a project only to get disqualified on a technicality, it is a hard lesson to learn and one around maximizing your results within the rules as long as you follow all the rules. Hopefully they will be successful in getting the rules updated moving forward to be more clear about the default github page templates vs just raw HTML hosting.
my understanding was that they were DQed for using github, not hosting there.
Which is just bananas. I can't think of a single decent piece of software that doesn't use Version Control, and 99.9999% of the software I know uses git for VC.
We need a new format. This institutional nonsense is for the birds.
How about reading and adhering to client project specs? That is a legitimate and important aspect of engineering. The spec said no github. Jekyll is also a legitimate tool for "decent software". In the professional realm, you will be using code generating tools, so the argument that 'X is commonly used for software development and thus the requirements are boneheaded' does not hold up,
Sure, if the spec uses it's terminology accurately and is unambiguous, but...
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
> generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
> such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
> are NOT permitted.
Github is certainly not a template engine website.
One could make the argument that it falls on the engineer to discuss the spec with the client - but these are high school students, and when they did attempt to discuss the spec with someone they were given the bureaucratic runaround.
We should have bought this to our TSA advisor, but the judge was a different teacher at our school. The problem we had was that we had to reach out to find out that we were disqualified and the appeal period was already passed. It would have been so simple to move to netlify hosting as can be seen in the github repo. It all stems from the fact that we misinterpreted the rules and had no ability to appeal in the short period allotted.
> It all stems from the fact that we misinterpreted the rules and had no ability to appeal in the short period allotted.
Those running this have dropped the ball at various places here, that's clear. I was thinking maybe a preliminary step can be added to the contest to sanity check review a project (and thus allow for addressing cases like yours.)
But regardless, I hope this has turned out to be a fairly generous silver lining for you and your team. The site looks great. Next step, get investors and get those tourist up in the air. /g
Yeah, this is indeed one of those life lessons that is inevitable. I just feel like this is the kind of thing you should learn after you've had a chance to pursue your interests enough to turn them into skills.
Programming is a joy. Engineering is a discipline. Customer relations is an unfortunately necessary workaround to a set of dumb problems.
I had something similar with a TSA event in the late 90s. My buddy and I took second place in the nationals for Computer Construction. We asked "why didn't we get first place?" and the response was "because your inventory had serial numbers listed. No one does that."... which was jaw dropping, because both of us had receipts from recent purchases at computer shops were every serial was tracked. Near the end of the event we found out that the judge of the computer construction contest was a teacher at the same school as the winner. Our teacher did nothing to contest it as we had a flight to catch. -sigh-
The judges are all volunteers that may or may not have a background in the actual event they are there to grade. So you get someone that just shows up, reads the rules for the event and then judges accordingly to those exact rules. Which in this case since the website is hosted by Github it automatically gets disqualified for not meeting the rules of the event. This is a pretty easy thing to fix which is either A) Just have a custom domain that hides the github hostname B) host it somewhere else. The students here seem to have taken the B approach and have it up on netlify now.
I certainly empathize with the students here putting hard work into a project only to get disqualified on a technicality, it is a hard lesson to learn and one around maximizing your results within the rules as long as you follow all the rules. Hopefully they will be successful in getting the rules updated moving forward to be more clear about the default github page templates vs just raw HTML hosting.