Winning not a priority for local students
By: Bill Greenwood
Students from the Noor-Ul-Iman School may not have any gold medals to call their own, but they certainly possess an olympic-sized devotion to science.
That revelation was made at this year’s New Jersey Science Olympiad, which took place Jan. 11 at Princeton University. A total of 31 students from the school attended the event, and 18 had their scores counted in the competition. While no Noor-Ul-Iman teams came out on top, several who participated said that wasn’t even the goal to begin with.
"It was our first year (participating)," said Miram Salem, an 11th-grader who competed with her teammates, Asma Saud and Reham Mobarak. "We haven’t done anything before, so we weren’t expecting to get first place. We just wanted to get our feet wet, basically."
Miram’s group competed in the Experimental Design event, in which they were given a set of objects in this case various metal weights, rubber bands, wire, a ruler and graph paper and were then required to design, conduct and analyze an experiment. The group tested how far each rubber band would stretch under each different weight.
The group then was required to write a lab report with all required sections completed including identifying dependent and independent variables, the control and more all within a 50-minute time limit.
"It was good that we had a group of three because we separated the work and did what we had to do," Asma said.
The group placed seventh out of 20 groups in the competition.
Another group, consisting of freshmen Mohamed Shahen and Zaid Syed, competed in the Storm the Castle event, a competition testing catapults called trebuchets, which consist of a heavy weight on one side and a catapult on the other. The boys were told to construct their trebuchet ahead of time, then at the competition, they were given an object of unknown weight and asked to launch it a distance of their choosing at a box with a castle on it.
"It was fun," Mohamed said. "It was the first time for me to compete against another school. We usually have a science fair here, but it’s within our class. So, it was a change."
Zaid said it took Mohamed and him about five hours to build the machine ahead of time.
"We bought the wood from Home Depot, about 30 feet of wood," he said. "We hammered and nailed it together."
The group finished eighth out of 15 to 20 competitors.
However, there was more to the event than simply competition, according to high school supervisor and biology teacher Saffiya Turan. She said the science olympiad, by offering 32 competitions focused on a different fields of science, helped students realize that science is multifaceted.
"I think a lot of times, at least in our community, people think science is a medical doctor and that’s it," she said. "There’s so many fields that are related to science. There are so many aspects of it, so I think that’s part of what the organizers are looking for in this, to show kids even though you’re not a straight A student, you may have an interest in a particular science that you don’t realize…"
Reham agreed, saying that she felt the science olympiad’s variety of events made it much more fun and exciting than other competitions.
"A lot of competitions that people enter are just like, ‘This is what you have to do,’ and everybody does the same thing," she said. "So, this gives you more leeway to be like, ‘This is what I’m better at. This is what I want to do.’ "
All of the students who competed said they would love to participate again next year, even students whose scores were not counted because of a rule allowing only five ninth-graders from a school to compete. Ms. Turan said they were able to stay occupied by watching the various competitions involving vehicle construction, including Storm the Castle and Robot Ramble.
"Basically, they were occupied the whole day," she said. "It was them wanting to go see what was going on in the other places and stuff. There wasn’t a single student that came back with a high school or teenage type of thing like, ‘Oh, that was boring,’ or, ‘I did nothing.’ It wasn’t that response at all."
Indeed, it does seem as if the students are already readying themselves for another try at olympiad gold. Mohamed and Zaid said they already had an idea for what they wanted to build for next year’s event, and Miram, Asma and Reham all said they were prepared to put in much more research before the next competition. Still, they all took time to express their gratitude for the chance to compete in a new kind of event for the school.
"It was something new that we’ve never done before because we usually do stuff that’s more liberal-arts based, like we do Model U.N., Model Congress, stuff like that," Reham said. "We got to do something different with the science, and it was fun. It was a good experience."