Taking a break from hosting a Math mini-contest for this month (for D.Buzz)

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calculation.jpg

Calculation image from Pixabay

I would take a break from hosting a Math mini-contest for D.Buzz for this month. 🛌

My primary reasons are the following:

  1. It takes me much time from creating the problem for the day up to writing the solution for each day. I try to make each problem not too easy or too difficult. It takes me even more time preparing images for my solutions, especially for geometry or trigonometry problems. ⏳
  2. The mini-contest has too few participants. I was expecting at least 3 participants per day. 👦
  3. I am not receiving feedback as to what can be improved regarding how I could attract more participants for the contest. 🤔

Regarding my requested feedback, I specifically want people to answer the following questions:

  1. Are my Math problems too difficult (or boring) to answer? 🤯
  2. Are certain time periods not favorable for interested people who could have participated in the contest? For example, are those people too busy during certain weeks or months? Is the time of posting of the daily Math problems (11:00 P.M. UTC) too late (or too early for most people)? 😴
  3. Are some parts of the contest rules too hard to follow or understand? I am thinking about the requirement where the participant must have engaged with D.Buzz a few days before leaving their answer. ⚖️
  4. Does my mini-contest need more exposure? Do I need to post (or cross-post) about the contest on more communities than D.Buzz and StemGeeks? Was I missing certain keywords which people interested in Math contests usually search? 📣

My most important goal of hosting the Math mini-contests for D.Buzz is for promoting engagement on the D.Buzz community (and Hive in general). Since that had not been met for consecutive months, I would now like to ask the community (participants or not) to leave their feedback regarding my Math mini-contest. 🤗 Feedbacks are engagement too. 😀

This break does not mean that I would host a Math mini-contest for the next month (or any of the succeeding months). 😮

I would still seek to promote engagement (in the form of comments) on D.Buzz (and other communities I like on Hive) through other means. 🙂

Participants: @minus-pi, @jfang003, @holovision, @ahmadmanga (@ahmadmangazap), @eturnerx (@eturnerx-dbuzz), @dkmathstats, @appukuttan66, and @paultactico2 🤓
Special mentions: @dbuzz, @chrisrice, @jancharlest, and @mehmetfix 🤯

Thanks for reading. 😀 Hope this post itself gets engagement too. 😁

Posted with STEMGeeks



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12 comments
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For me it was a time thing. When the questions were posted I was too busy. Shrugs it's global.so timing is a hard problem.

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I sometimes think about posting two Math problems in a single day which will make it more fair to participants in terms of the time, cutting the prize of each problem by half (to 0.5 HIVE). 🤔

However, while it would potentially attract more participants, it will definitely require even more time for me to host the contest. 😮

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. 🙂 Have a !PIZZA! 😁

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I personally had fun during the math contests .... Ive not been able to take part for the last couple of months because most of my free time goes for a lil' something I'm making ... Will more active after it though ☺️☺️

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Thanks for your comment! 😀

Based on your comment, your reason for not being able to join is because you are busy. 🤔 I'll keep that in mind! 😁

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(Edited)

I fully understand your decision, participation was really low last month. I had a lot of fun with your contests, also in the earlier contests. I know it's hard to come up with good problems that can be solved within decent time, solve them yourself and post that solution in a way that is understandable for all. The difficulty was just right for me, but that may be different for others. I think posting time can't be 'right' for everyone, we're all distributed over various time zones anyway. I must admit I wasn't using dbuzz very much. Your contest made me look into dbuzz more often, at least around the contest time.

What can be improved to attract more participants? As simple as it may sound, but would it maybe help to add the reward in the post title?

[1 HIVE reward] Math mini-contest problem for Day X on D.Buzz...

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I find your suggestion about adding the prize to the title great. 🙂 However, I tried searching for other contests, and they get a lot of engagement even if they don't put the reward itself on the title. 🤔 Besides that, I don't want the prize to be the only reason of other people to participate in the contest. 😐

Thanks for your understanding, feedback, and suggestion! 😀

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Well I was a bit busy last time as I stated before. I think its kind of tough but maybe you can mix up the times for the posting so nobody really has an unfair advantage. For example, you can choose X time on Day 1, Y time on Day 2 and etc. With that people will know the times beforehand but they can still participate depending on when they see it.

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Thanks for the suggestion, but I really think that having different posting times for each problem would confuse all participants. 🤯

I think that my idea about providing 2 problems per day (with half the prize for each problem) would minimize participants' problems regarding the time, but it would cost me about twice the time and effort. 🤔 What if I just make the Math mini-contest only 3 days per month, with each day having 2 Math problems on 12-hour intervals, and the prize is still 1 HIVE per problem? 🤔🤔😁

@minus-pi

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Interesting thoughts! I think I would not be able to participate twice per day, so I'm not sure of this would increase participation, at least from me :) Thinking about it, what about the other way around, a new problem every second day? It would give more time for participation. You could post the solutions in the days between, to also advertise the ongoing tasks?

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Thanks again for your feedback! 😀

How about a rule by which a participant can win only once a day, as to allow the participant who answered correctly to rest? 🤔 That assumes however that the participant is certain about answering the first problem for the day correctly. 😅

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