MAKE Magazine salutes the creative and technological spirit of the 2,000+ middle school and high school students who will descend upon the campus of Wichita State University in Kansas to compete in the 23rd Annual Science Olympiad National Tournament on May 18-19, 2007. Teams from 45 states will battle it out in events that span the sciences, including Boomilever, Storm the Castle, Mission Possible, Scrambler, Wheeled Vehicle and Circuit Lab. Science Olympiad is a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of K-12 STEM education and providing recognition for outstanding achievement by both students and teachers. To find out more about Science Olympiad or to get a team started in your school, see
www.soinc.org or http://webs.wichita.edu/nso/Home.html.
8 thoughts on “2007 Science Olympiad National tournament”
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There was a rule made specifically because of my team’s Rube Goldberg machine about 10 years ago. There used to be no restrictions about what kind of energy transfer could follow another energy transfer (you could have a bunch of mechanical transfers in a row).
So we read the rules many times, and determined that you could just have one game of Mousetrap (with the man in the pan, etc) trigger another game of Mousetrap, throw in an electrical energy transfer and we were done.
They also (or may still) have a “Surfing the Net” competition. They would give you a bunch of obscure stuff to search for on the Internet. I was in the very first year of that. It seems crazy, but there was no Google. You had to pick between Lycos, Webcrawler, Excite, Yahoo, and Altavista. Oh, how the times have changed.
Ha! I remember that. I think I was also in the first year of the surfing the net competition in either my junior or senior year in high school. Even at the time I considered it a joke, and didn’t think it should be included in the Science Olympiad… hopefully they’ve gotten rid of it.
looks like they only did the Surfing the Net one like 2 years… 98 and 99.
I was in SO between 92-94 and made it to nationals my 7th and 8th grade years scoring a national bronze medal in taxonomy and a 9th place in anatomy/physiology and about 20 1st place state medals. I was around for the first trial of Mission Possible and before we even started ours the judges told us if it worked we were guaranteed 1st place. Ours was exponentially more complex than any of the others teams. we had 555 timers set up on redundancies to make sure things went off when they were supposed to. They didn’t believe that kids had constructed it until I walked them through every step (including exactly how the circuit boards were mapped out) and explained and calculated the energy transfers.