Science Olympiad Invitational
Monday, January 30, 2017 at 10:44AM On Saturday, Asher & Micah and their Science Olympiad team competed in our local Science Olympiad Invitational. They've been studying and practicing with their team since September, and this was basically a practice run with 16 other teams. (Regionals is next (in March), then State is after that (in April) in any events they qualify in.)
Most of the other teams were from local middle schools, some of which have dedicated classes specifically for Science Olympiad. Most of the other teams also had more than a dozen kids on each team, meaning each kid had 2-4 events. Our homeschool team has only 9 kids. Two of them are technically underage (not middle school) and each of those two only have two events. Which means that the rest of our kids each have more like 4-6 events to cover. Half of our team has done this once before (last year). Half is completely new.
And, recognizing that not all of the Science Olympiad events that will be competed in at Regionals were run on Saturday and that the Invitational is run by team coaches so is not necessarily indicative of how Regionals will go, our team placed SECOND!
Needless to say, we were a little delighted. :)
Here's a picture of Asher & Micah doing the Optics event. (Each event has 1-3 team members. This is one of two that Asher & Micah do together.) The Optics event is supposed to have two parts...one "lab" portion, where students use mirrors to direct a laser...and one "knowledge" portion, which is basically just a written test. In the picture, they're looking at the lab set up, but the team who was running Optics chose not to do the lab portion of the event. Which was unfortunate, since that was pretty much the only part that my guys had prepared for, lol. (Given the number of events and how the scoring worked, we were working off of the "just showing up earns us points and for some of our events that's what we're going to end up doing" premise.) Amazingly, Asher & Micah took third in this event. Weird. Either they're really good at guessing or some of the limited studying we did actually sank in.
Between events, there was a lot of sitting together at our "base." Here, some of the boys are trying to access the school's wifi, lol.
And here's 8/9ths of our team:
(We only had a minute between events when they were all in the same place, but at the last minute we lost one, lol.)
We have two 3rd graders, three 6th graders, one 7th grader and three 8th graders. Their mascot is "Steve the Pessimistic Cow" and that's what's on their shirts. (I'll try to take a better picture when they do Regionals.) The kids came up with that on their own, lol.
In any case, very proud of the team! Now that they have this practice under their belts, we'll be spending February getting ready for Regionals.
Reader Comments (1)
Very cool!