WT’s middle school and high school Science Olympiad team competed at the Southwestern Regional Competition at PennWest University at California the first Saturday of Spring Break. The team placed 2nd overall as a team, meaning that they will be traveling in April to compete in the state-wide competition.
Science Olympiad is a science competition consisting of 23 different events. Two to three members of the team will compete in each event. The events range from build events (an event where you are given parameters and have to build a structure or object to best perform under those parameters), study events (an event where you have to study a topic and take a thorough test on it), and lab events (where you have to perform an activity or lab as best as you can).
The Science Olympiad Middle School division allows teams to include up to five 9th grade students. Sami Alissa, Indie Pascal, Lucy Bair, Sam Hammons, and Sarah Levin-Decanini all competed on the middle school team, and helped them to win 1st overall.
Here are some of the high school results!
Owen Meyer and Eris Pil competed in Air Trajectory and got 6th place. This event consisted of building a contraption that could launch a ping pong ball a certain distance using air power. Watch out for any flying missiles around them, because their ping pongs launched pretty far.
The dynamic and iconic duo Andrew Shlomchik and Yazan Alissa competed in Anatomy and Physiology and earned a 1st place medal! This year, A&P was about the cardiovascular system, the excretory system, and the lymphatic system. They both definitely know way too much about how pee is made… but also about the heart and stuff.
Nicky Gandhi and Rachel Valenty competed in Astronomy and earned a 3rd place medal! They know all about star classifications to astrophysics, but don’t ask them about their sun, rising, and moon signs.
The dynamic duo is back! Andrew Shlomchik and Yazan Alissa earned themselves another 1st place medal in Chemistry Lab. Sadly this was their last event together, but they did extremely well every time they have worked together.
Vanessa Gonzalez-Richener, Solvei Islam, and Jack Iyer competed together in the Codebusters event and placed 3rd. Whenever you receive a cryptic cipher, ask one of these three to help you decipher it.
Nicky Gandhi and Owen Meyer placed 4th in Detector Building. I’m not going to lie, this event is way too difficult for me to even understand. Both Nicky and Owen built a detector using a blue solution that was affectionately named the “slurp juice.” They also crushed the test, half of it was completed with no notes, while Jack and I sprinted around to different parking lots to try to find the bus with the notes in it.
Joya Nasr and Hannah Hammons (me!) competed in Disease Detectives and earned ourselves a 3rd place medal. For better or for worse, Joya and I know way too much about disease spread and epidemiology, and have definitely not led us to be increasingly more anxious about getting sick than before.
Andrew Shlomchik and Nicky Gandhi competed in Dynamic Planet together. Simply judging from the fact that Andrew competed in this event, they placed 1st! But in actuality, Nicky and Andrew both learned so much about geology and rock formations, and they deserve this.
Felix Gamper and Hannah Hammons (me) competed in Ecology and earned ourselves a 1st place medal! I have to give a special shoutout to Vivian Loh who helped me get one of the questions right because she wrote a whole paper for Environmental Lit on the European Gypsy Moth, and was one of the focus invasive species on the test. Vivian, this one’s for you.
Vanessa Gonzalez-Rychener, Solvei Islam, and Joya Nasr competed in Experimental Design and placed 2nd! Experimental Design is the most stressful event in Science Olympiad. You are given materials and a topic, and have to complete an entire lab and lab report in 50 minutes. Kudos to these three who took on this challenge and absolutely demolished it!
Adrian Musekamp and Felix Gamper competed in Fermi Questions, an event where you have to estimate values based on an extreme series of unit conversions and estimation. They placed 7th in this event.
Nicky Gandhi and Eris Pil built the best plane in WT SciOly history for the Flight event. With a flight time of approximately 50 seconds, this plane rivals even those of Mr. President himself (Tommy Gordon; plane enthusiast).They placed 3rd in this event!
Yazan Alissa and Jack Iyer placed 14th in Forensics. If there is a murder, watch out, because Jack and Yazan will catch you.
Alice Busseler and Hannah Hammons (me) placed 1st in Forestry. We have both spent way too much of our time memorizing leaf shapes and bark textures, so this is well deserved. Shoutout to the Quaking Aspen, which is a super cool tree, and has an interconnected roots system with upshoots with different trunks. If you see an aspen grove, that is probably all one tree!
Adrian Musekamp and Rachel Valenty placed 2nd in Fossils. If you ever want to know the approximate size of different dinosaur pelvises, ask them. I heard you can calculate them from the footprint size?
Rachel Valenty and Andrew Shlomchik competed in the Geologic Mapping event and placed 2nd! This is notoriously a terrible event to be in, as it is a very hard combination between geology and geography. Andrew joined this event a week before the competition and was able to learn the material well enough for a medal.
Alice Busseler and Felix Gamper placed 1st in the Microbe Mission event. Once again, the Gamper not only scampers, but hits a walk off with this one.
Adrian Musekamp and Felix Gamper placed 5th in Optics together. From using mirrors to direct lasers to calculating the refractive index of different substances, Felix and Adrian SAW this event through from studying to competition.
Maya Finke and Lucy Bair built the robot for the Robot Tour event together. By programming this robot, they were able to navigate this robot through an unknown maze to get 5th place.
Adrian Musekamp and Jack Iyer built a vehicle that could curve around an object carrying an egg to get to a certain distance in the Scrambler event. They placed 6th in this, and did not crack their egg. That sounds like a job well done, or a job over easy.
Maya Finke and Eris Pil built a tower out of balsa wood in the Tower event to place 13th.
Eris Pil and Vanessa Gonzalez-Rychener got 4th place in the Wind Power event. They learned about renewable energy and built a wind turbine for this event.
Alice Busseler and Joya Nasr competed together in the Write It Do It event and placed 9th. This event involves one person being shown an object made out of household items, and then that person has to write instructions on how to build it. The next person will have to build that object only using the instructions that their partner wrote.
A big congrats to all of the competitors in Science Olympiad, and good luck at States!
