Middlesex County College, Edison, hosted the 16th annual state finals tournament for the Science Olympiad, a nationwide competition for middle and high school students in scientific and engineering acumen.
PHOTOS BY JEFF GRANIT staff Christopher Nowakowski (l-r) and Chris Yang, of Freehold Borough High School, prepare their car for the Electric Vehicle event at the Science Olympiad at Middlesex County College, Edison. The college hosted the Science Olympiad, where middle and high school students competed in scientific and engineering events. The event, held March 11, brought together teams from 50 different schools from all over the state to compete in a variety of challenges, from written tests to engineering challenges. Many of the teams attending on that day were the winners of smaller, regional tournaments.
The winners of the state competition, West Windsor- Plainsboro North, West Windsor-Plainsboro South, and Princeton high schools, as well as Community Middle School (inWestWindsor), Montgomery Middle School and Churchill Junior High School (in East Brunswick) are now moving on to the national competition.
Akram Mohamed (l-r) and Omar Arafa, from Darul Arqam School in South River, catapult a ball in the trajectory event at the Science Olympiad. According to Jenn Wirt, one of the event’s organizers, New Jersey tends to be a strong state in these competitions, having placed first nationally in 2005 and 2007.
In one room, small robots competed to do tasks such as move batteries and open boxes. In another, various contraptions were launching pingpong balls in a variety of ways. In another, students were examining animals in jars and identifying them, down to their individual order, family, genus and species.
Another of the events, the tower, calls on students to build a small structure out of wood strong enough to support a bucket of sand.
Entrants are judged both on how much weight their tower can support as well as how light their creation is, creating an emphasis on efficiency. Contestants mount a bucket on a chain to their tower, and the judge slowly fills it with sand, gradually adding more weight until it collapses.
“They do it until it fails. The towers that win are the towers that actually break,” said Jim Finne, a professor of engineering at the college overseeing that competition. He said a heavy tower could hold plenty of weight, but that would be missing the point. “This is an issue of optimization.”
Amiddle school team from VoorheesMiddle School anxiously watched as Finne filled the bucket. The structure’s top first groaned and then finally twisted, as the 11.83- gramstructure’s strength supported 4,240 grams. This put them in second place, though Finne warned them that the competition was still young.
“We tried to make it as light as possible.We didn’t focus on strength too much from the stresses.We thought about strength, but our main focus was on the weight. … We would work until about 11 o’clock at night, and it took us at least two weeks,” said Ravi Chauhan, a seventh-grader.
Another team, from the Marine Academy of Technology and Environmental Science (MATES) of the Ocean County Vocational-Technical School District, inManahawkin, was disappointed when they found out that they had gotten a detail of their design wrong and thus were informed that, at best, they would place 23rd.
“It wasn’t wide enough, so they said you guys are automatically 23rd. … Everyone else managed to get the spec except for one other person, and so that automatically brings us down to, best-case scenario, 23rd place,” said Jessie Gugig, a seventh-grader who, despite this development, remained chipper, saying that next time she’ll get the specs right. She said that overall,while it’s a lot ofwork, the Science Olympiad is fun.
“It’s fun, it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of hard work, but if you do it right, you get to bring home some nice shiny trophies and medals and ribbons and stuff,” said Gugig.
This sentiment of “difficult but fun” was shared bymany students competing in the Science Olympiad that day.
“The competition is awesome, and in this day and age most competition is through athletics and stuff like this. But this is kind of for science kids, people like us,” said Bill MacDowell, 15, who is also from the MATES school. As he spoke, his partner, Harsha Prasad, was tinkering with a rubber-band-powered glider they were hoping would win them the “Wright Stuff” event, involving small gliders.
In addition to the competing students, there were many parents and coaches walking through the halls, observing the progress of the various students. Nick Cutro, coach of the Mount Olive Middle School team in Morristown, said the competitions were a positive influence for students because they help people who are interested in science to learn beyond what their regular classes might be offering. He said that formany, the Science Olympiad has the workload of a class unto itself.
“It really gets them more involved in science and technology. When you look at your science classes, it’s just science, and in these classes, where you can kind of take it to the next level, like rocks and minerals or ecology, the kids go further into specified areas and it really benefits them in the long run,” said Cutro.