Dear parent,

Thank you for participating in the recently conducted NSF National Finals at the University of Maryland , College Park , MD. We hope you and your child(ren) had a great time during the Finals, investing in the learning process in the run-up to the Finals.

New: The list of winners in the NSF 2009 National Finals held at University of Maryland, College Park, MD is now online. Please click here to view the list. Parents will be able to login and view the scores of individual contests by the week of August 10th. Thank you for your patience.

Important: If a contestant is a winner and would like to receive their trophy, then, they should send an Email to nsffinalstrophy@gmail.com with their details. Winners who need trophies mailed, will have to make a check to NSF for $30, to cover the cost of shipping. We should recieve the request within 2 weeks of the results being posted.

We would love to hear from you about your experience at the Finals and how we can improve it next year.

Survey:
Please fill out the survey here to help us gather valuable feedback.

Photos:
Contest Photos

1st Day Awards

2nd Day Awards

Scores:
All the scores have been uploaded. You can login (same process as you did to register) and view the scores for individual contests by clicking on View Status for Finals.

Challenges:

Conducting NSF Finals with more than 2,000 people attending over a two-day period has become a challenge every year, especially given that we change venue each year to a different city and local volunteers always face this as a first time event.  Since the event taxes heavily on the local volunteers, we can never hope to keep the event in the same location for more than a year.  We tried only once in Chicago in recent years to conduct for two consecutive years and found it is impractical to replicate.

Here are a couple issues we had discovered and want to share them with all of you.

Goodie Bags / T-shirts:
More than 95 percent of the contestants got the goodie bags and T-shirts.  We sincerely apologize to the others for running out of them.  The order for these items had to be placed early because of the early Finals this year.  Since the later registrations, after the order is placed, created this shortage, some contestants missed them on Sunday although they registered well before the deadline in June.  We again apologize and will take measures to avoid shortages in the future.

Food:

On Sunday, about 97 percent of the people received meal boxes from the cafeteria.  We ran out of food for the others causing undue delay and waiting.  We are sorry and apologize for this.  Many more volunteers showed up on Sunday than we anticipated causing food shortage.  Lessons learned here will be used to prevent problems in the future.

Thanks again and looking forward to your feedback.

NSF Finals Team