A room is an appraiser team that will be appraising a specific challenge at a tournament.


The term room is used because this set of appraisers will be in a room / venue at a tournament.


Identifying rooms of appraisers is important due to the way DI scoring works.  DI rules state that the teams competing against one another are those solving the same DI challenge at the same DI level. These teams must be scored by same team of appraisers.


At the majority of tournaments, this means that the teams solving a specific DI challenge at a specific tournament:

  • solve the same DI Challenge (such as the fine-arts challenge) and are appraised by same room of team challenge appraisers
  • solve the same Instant Challenge and are appraised by the same room of instant challenge appraisers


If a tournament has fewer than 100 teams, a team challenge room of appraisers typically appraises more than one challenge-level. You commonly see such an appraiser team appraising Tech-EL (tech challenge-elementary level), Tech-ML, and Tech-SL. The appraisers have an expertise in the Tech Challenge, so they see the teams in more than one level.  


Instant challenges are unknown to the appraisers prior to the tournament but the appraisers may have skills best directed toward a technical challenge.  This room of IC appraisers might see Tech-SL, Sci-SL and Eng-SL.  


At larger tournaments there might be too many teams in Tech-ML for a single team of appraisers to appraise.  In this case 2 different rooms of appraisers might be needed.  This is know as a split.  Click here for more detail on splits.


Each room has a name.  Team Challenge rooms can be named for the challenge or the venue, such as TC-Tech, Gym or Library.  If you plan to have 2 small challenges in the library then you might use Library-Improv and Library-Serv.  They can't both be called Library as each room needs a unique name.


Due to the secret nature of IC, IC room names might be IC-1, IC-2,... or for the level such as ic-el-1, ic-el-2,...