A1:

It's very important for us to know how many students are participating in this contest. If we posted bridge costs on the Scoreboard, you (and a lot of others) would probably not register or submit a design until you had created a bridge good enough to be posted to the Scoreboard. A lot of students might be participating in the contest, but we would only know about the few who submitted winning designs.

We recognize that you would like to get feedback about your design. That's why the contest website tells you your standing in the contest every time you submit a new design. At the end of the Qualifying Round, we will post the costs of the top bridge designs from each zone.

Yes. There is no restriction on the number of teams that may compete from any given school. There is also no restriction on collaboration during the Qualifying Round, so even if some of these teams got a lot of help from their friends, they have not broken any rules.

Don't worry! This situation will sort itself out at the end of the Qualifying Round. According to the rules, if a given zone has more than one team from a particular school, we reserve the right to invite more than ten teams from that zone to compete in the Semi-Final Round. This will ensure that one school cannot monopolize the top 10 and prevent other teams from getting into the Semi-Finals. Also, note that collaboration is not authorized during the Semifinal Round. Thus teams that have received a lot of assistance during the Qualifying Round are probably not going to do very well in the Semifinals, when they are required to work entirely on their own.

Yes. There is no restriction on the number of teams that may compete from any given school. There is also no restriction on collaboration during the Qualifying Round, so even if some of these teams got a lot of help from their friends, they have not broken any rules.

Don't worry! This situation will sort itself out at the end of the Qualifying Round. According to the rules, if a given zone has more than one team from a particular school, we reserve the right to invite more than ten teams from that zone to compete in the Semi-Final Round. This will ensure that one school cannot monopolize the top 10 and prevent other teams from getting into the Semi-Finals. Also, note that collaboration is not authorized during the Semi-Final Round. Thus teams that have received a lot of assistance during the Qualifying Round are probably not going to do very well in the Semi-Finals, when they are required to work entirely on their own. Finally, note that no more than two teams from any given zone will be allowed to compete in the Final Round.

When you click on the map or click one of the links on the Scoreboard page, the corresponding scoreboard should be displayed in a popup window. If the popup doesn't pop up, there are three possible causes:

(1) The scoreboard popups are opened by Javascript code. If Javascript is disabled on your browser (some organizations do this for security reasons), then the scoreboard popups will not display. If this is your problem, then the only way to fix it is to enable Javascript on your browser.

(2) If you already have a popup window loaded underneath your current browser window, some browsers will silently load the scoreboard popup into that window and not bring it to the front. To check for this, close all browser windows; then restart the browser, go directly to the Scoreboard page, and click the map.

(3) If you have installed software that is meant to automatically close popup advertising windows as you browse the web, then that software is the problem. The technique our site uses to display scoreboards in popup windows is the same technique the advertisers use to display their annoying ads. Your software doesn't know the difference, and it is killing the scoreboard popups.