November 10, 2009
Science Olympiad

Many of you, may have heard of Science Olympiad before. Our school doesn't participate in the formal Science Olympiad competition that others do - but they do run there own program resembling it once a year. They have several practices where they can experiment with the challenges - finding out what does and doesn't work, gather data and make notes. Then they come together for a "competition night" where several teams compete to see who can perform the tasks at hand the most successfully and/or the fastest. It was quite interesting to see.

The first event actually takes place in a dark room, but I took a picture when they brought the lights back up so you could actually see what it involves. A flashlight is placed on the ground - as well as a picture of a something. Then - in various places in the room are these pieces of paper, which they call islands. Each island holds 2 mirrors connected together. The lights are turned off and they need to move the mirrors in such a way so that the light from the flashlight reflects off from the mirrors until it hits the picture. The light has to touch every mirror before it reaches the picture and the time the team to see how quickly they can accomplish this.

The next event is patterning. 2 teammates sit opposite each other behind a screen. One of them has a piece of paper showing a pattern. The other teammate has a bucket full of tile pieces of various shapes, sizes and colors. The player with the paper has to describe to their teammate how to reproduce the pattern with the tiles, using nothing but words. Again, they are timed to see how quickly they could correctly reproduce the given pattern.

In the next event - they are given 100 mini marshmallows and toothpicks. They have to build a structure as high as they can - that can stay for at least 10 seconds before tipping and see how high they can build it.

In the final event, they are given 2 pieces of tin foil. With this foil - they need to build 2 "boats". The boats are then placed in a tub of water and they start putting pennies on the boat one at a time. The goal is to see how many pennies their boat will hold before it sinks.

At the end of the night - they have a small awards ceremony. Nicholas' team got 3rd place out of 3 teams for their age group this year but that's OK - they learned a lot and are learning how to work with others to accomplish a task.

A picture of all of the kids who participated in Science Olympiad this year.