Slashdot Mirror
Uncle Science Olympiad Needs You
Devlin-du-GEnie writes "I'll be judging an event for Florida's state Science Olympiad this coming weekend. It's kind of like a track meet of science and engineering. The participants are middle- and high-school students from all over Florida. (There are also two elementary school divisions.) I judged an event last year. It was incredibly rewarding to see kids fiercely competitive and engaged with problem solving. It's chock-full of geekly joy." Read on for some more details, including how you can get involved in the program.
The menu of events includes:
- Bottle Rocket
- Cell Biology
- Chemistry Lab
- Designer Genes
- Disease Detectives
- Dynamic Planet
- Experimental Design
- Robot Ramble
- Storm the Castle (catapaults!)
- Naked Egg Drop
I know this will be interpreted as a troll but I'm really interested in the answer. Is any attempt made at determining whether these kids get help from their parents? Is it done by the honor system? I would think that meddling from over-excited parents would be a significant factor in these science olympiads (kinda of the equivalent of steroids in the real olympics).
I remember back when I was in 5th grade the class had to build 'solar cookers' that we could use to cook our lunch for that day. Mine was passable but not great. Scott L., had a solar cooker you wouldn't believe. I was struggling to get enough heat in there to cook weenies and he was heating frozen pizzas, I kid you not. Not too surprisingly Scott's father was a high-school science teacher. Now it is theoretically possible that Scott was simply a smarter kid than I was (although it's worth noting that years later I would go on to get a Ph. D. in a scientific field from one of the most prestidous science institutes in the world and Scott did not) but I think we can pretty much agree that it's more likely the reason for Scott's superior performance was because he had considerable help from parents whereas I built my thing with my own two (small) hands.
That was over two decades ago. In that time parents, if anything, have gotten even more insistent that their kids perform better than their peers. Parents so often push their kids to excel just so they can brag about them at work or at the local garden club meeting or whatnot. So I ask you, how much of a problem is parental-assistance in these science olympiads in this day and age and how do you deal with it?
GMD
watch this
I have had the pleasure of judging different Science Olympiad events for a number of years now. I started with "Metric Mastery" for the middle school crowd. It involves some pretty difficult estimation skills.
After I got my own college physics lab to run, I ran the entire physics lab portion of the Science Olympiad for 3 years. I got to do both the regional and the state competitions. I was enthusiastic about the future after seeing what these kids could do!
I'm now at my third school and Science Olympiad is comming up. It's a great event to be involved with!
I decided that I didn't like SO after watching big high schools stomp little high schools into dust. This is a time when people's egos are very fragile, and there is simply too much importance put on those "bronze", "silver", and "gold" medals. With smaller schools, kids would have to take on multiple events to qualify, which is a real burden. Also, schools with helpful parents fare much better, especially for the construction events. Building a rube-goldberg machine is a bit easier if someone's dad has a garage full of junk or works for a surplus store.
The nationals were very sensationalistic, too. Not to mention far away, meaning many people were disappointed when their stuff got there broken.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I actually got disqualified from a Science Olympiad event when I was in eighth grade, and I'm still bitter.
The contest? Hot house. The goal, using the lightest mass fully enclosed "house" possible, try and insulate 100mL beaker of 100 water. Basically, the judges would fill a beaker for you, you'd place it in your device, and they'd take the temperature after 30 minutes.
The scoring was something like: deltaT*mass, and lowest score wins. deltaT measured in degrees Celsius and mass in grams. It didn't take me long to realize that the scoring wasn't geared toward the best insulator, but actually toward the lightest material.
So building a small rectangular house out of paper led to a design with a high loss of temperature, but a really low score. I thought it was brilliant. The judges thought it was cheating.
I still don't think I should have been disqualified. I got my first place my other event, but strangely, I don't remember what that was.