UIL Sliderule Tests

The Sliderule

I was fortunate to be in Ramiro Sanchez's Math Club at North Mesquite High School. When I graduated in 1975, our geometry teacher let me keep my Pickett 905-ES "A" Texas Speed Rule. I think she could see the writing on the wall. The pocket calculator had been out for a while, and the costs (at least for the Texas Instruments family) were coming down. My dad bought me a TI SR-50 for graduation to take to college. It must've cost him $75 - still quite a bit of money in 1975.

Later, at Texas Tech, I'd wandered by the off-campus bookstore and saw in the display window, the elegant K+E Log-Log Decitrig in it's beautiful orange-red calf-skin case. I couldn't afford it on my student budget... it was all of about $40. In another year, I'd be gone to North Texas State (now UNT), and slide rules would longer be found in campus bookstores.

I finally snagged one of these beautiful K+E's at a slide rule swap meet. Just as the meet was coming to an end, Skip Solberg wanted to close with an auction. I was highest bidder: $25. It's one of my favorite rules (first for utility, but second just for nostalgia's sake).

The "Texas Speed Rule" was designed for the UIL contests and the Texas educational market. It was distributed by Ridgway, a school supply firm. They rarely come up on eBay, and prices are high. Mine is not for sale.

The Slide rule contests that had been a part of UIL competition since at least the 1960s ended in 1980.

The Tests

Contest Tests

These were actual tests used for UIL Sliderule competition. In fact, our math club at North Mesquite H.S. used these for practice as well. Time Limit: 30 minutes

As a bonus, these may be used to prepare for Skip Solberg's annual competition at the "Antique Science and Retro-Tech" show and swapmeet. Note that Skip's tests include some log and trig problems as well. Since the Texas Speed Rule did not have log-log scales, these types of problems do not show up in the UIL tests. (Brag: I've won it 3 times and tied once).

Special Tests

These tests were not meant to be used for contests. For some reason, perhaps for practice or to ascertain a person's skill these "Special" tests were made available.

Tie-Breaker Tests

From time to time, a UIL contest results in a tie. These short tests were given to break that tie. Time limit: 10 minutes.

Number Sense Tests

While we were stripping our fingers out on our Picket 905-ES "A" Texas Speed Rules, tapping out the exponent counts with our feet, our compadres in Number Sense were working on some of these. These are originally from the http://texasmath.org website; I've cross-posted here in hopes of saving them some bandwidth and also because I like to run a few of these myself once in a while (for mental exercise).

And, because the TexasMath.org website is focuesed on the current crop of young-uns, I'll post here, for historical record, the UIL Academic results from 1944 to 1979. This data was pulled from the Internet Archive Project (archive.org); for reference, I was #12 out of 12 in 1975 State Slide Rule.