Science Olympiad

During the first few weeks of school, Shelby brought home a sign-up paper for Science Olympiad. Since I participated in Science Olympiad during junior high and high school, I really wanted her to sign-up, but decided I'd let her choose. Fortunately, she didn't need any convincing from me, and joined the team. For about 6 weeks, she has stayed after school on Tuesdays for an hour to practice. They got to try out all of the different events during the course of their practices, and then on the day of the district Science Olympiad competition they would find out in which events they would get to participate.

Well today was the day of the competition. Early this morning, Shelby and I headed off to one of the high schools in the school district. She admitted to me that she was a little nervous; I was too, because I didn't know any of the adults who would be in charge of her, but I didn't admit that to her. We got to the school, signed in, got her changed into her Science Olympiad shirt, and then she headed off to the bleachers to wait around with her team while I headed home.

Not too long after I left, the kids gathered in the auditorium where they got to see a Mad Scientist ... from listening to Shelby, I decided he was more of a scientific magician. She really enjoyed watching his tricks, and he even had students come up to help out although she was not one of the ones picked.

After the Mad Scientist, it was time to compete. Shelby got to participate in Egg Drop, Science Jeopardy, and Magnets. For Egg Drop, she and her partner had to create a container that would safely allow an egg to be dropped onto a target without breaking. Unfortunately, their egg broke, but, since everyone's eggs broke, the winner will be determined by how quickly their container was made and by how close they were to the target. Shelby said that they did really well and were only about 10 inches from the target and they finished fairly quickly.

Science Jeopardy was exactly that ... jeopardy on science topics. Shelby was part of a team of 4 competing with 5 other teams. Out of the 25 questions, they answered 2 correctly. I believe they were perfect on their answering of questions, but they weren't very fast on the buzzer. Oh well. She did enjoy it, and even got to answer one of their questions with a "What is orbit."

Her final event was magnets, which I haven't quite determined what she did that could be scored and judged. Oh well. In a few weeks, we will get the results, and we'll get to see how she did overall.


As you can tell, she had a fun day!!