[ad_1]
After more than nine months of planning, Northwestern University’s Science Olympiad Club held its third annual invitational on campus Saturday. This highly anticipated event saw over 600 high school students compete in 26 science categories.
Science Olympiad is a national organization that hosts competitions for middle school and high school students. Contest themes vary from year to year, but typically include a wide range of sciences such as biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering.
This year, NU’s clubs expanded on last year’s competition, offering more events and utilizing more space on campus.
Using nearly every building on campus, from Tech to Fisk, the club arranges for 15 faculty members and more than 120 undergraduate and graduate student volunteers to host events ranging from code-breaking to fossil classification. supervised.
Gabby Nolasco, Weinberg’s junior, volunteered as a human anatomy and physiology teaching assistant, helping out with the Science Olympiad for the second time. She said she loves helping her students learn more about topics that interest her too.
“It was really fun just being there. I got to see the students bring in little cheat sheets for their exams,” she said. “It felt weird being around the teacher. It was really cool.”
Many science events involve chemicals and laboratories that require faculty supervision. Professor Katie Gesmund, director of the Weinberg Comprehensive Chemistry Laboratory, said she was eager to support the club’s efforts.
“I’m excited for these high school students to be able to experience a college lab for the first time because I think it will be a lightbulb moment for them,” Gesmund said. “They still have high school tournaments, but it feels special to do it in college and we’re happy to offer this location.”
Club co-presidents Weinberg junior Skyler Stone and McCormick junior Jack Vogel worked tirelessly with other members of the board to extend the invitation to schools across the country and prepare . They said they were “thrilled” by the turnout.
Stone said the registration period is first-come, first-served.
“This year we filled up within an hour, which is incredible,” Stone said.
The participating high school teams included the top two teams from Illinois, the top team from Nevada, and a team from California, the nation’s fourth-ranked public high school.
“We had 41 teams from different schools,” Vogel said. “Five or six of the teams had been to the national tournament before, so there was some very strong competition.”
The event began at 8 a.m. and lasted until 5 p.m., culminating with an awards ceremony held at Tech Auditorium.
Katie Schreetlin and Sudiksha Napolian, freshmen at Naperville North High School in Illinois, said they think some aspects of the event could have been improved.
Napoleon said she felt many of the tests had not been updated to match the current rules of the official Science Olympiad competition, and Schloeltin said there were problems with the competition schedule.
“The way the schedule was set up meant that a lot of people had two events going on at the same time, so they couldn’t attend both,” Schroetlin said.
However, some high school students thought the experience was better than many competitions they had previously participated in.
“We had a really dedicated event director this year,” said Steven Chan, a senior at Lake Forest Academy in Illinois. “It was probably the best chemistry lab I’ve ever been in. It was really organized, there were a lot of enthusiastic TAs, and overall it was very nice.”
All in all, Stone said, the event is a unique opportunity for high school students to explore a college campus and learn more about science that they might not be exposed to in a typical high school curriculum.
“I don’t think enough people are excited about science,” she says. “It’s so refreshing to see the high school students so excited and working so hard for this event.”
Email: [email protected]
X: @skylerzur74
Related article:
— Northwestern University and Uticago University establish new Life Sciences and Mathematics Institute
— Introducing the engineering club “Concrete Canoe” where you can learn how to make concrete floats.
— McCormick Engineering Career Development hosts Employer Week for students and employers
[ad_2]
Source link
