Yesterday, 19 PRISMS students fought in New Jersey Science Olympiad State Championship Tournament — the last Science Olympiad event of the year before the national round at the end of April. PRISMS got gratifying results — one fifth place and two sixth places out of 27 teams.
Science Olympiad is a competition in which high school students from around the country compete in events related to various scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy and engineering. Science Olympiad was first proposed by several Michigan high school science teachers in 1982. In 35 years, it developed from a local workshop to a national event in which thousands of teams from 50 states participate in. As a young school with only four years of history, this was the first time PRISMS took part in a nationwide Science Olympiad.
Dr.Chen was the coach of PRISMS team. “In September, 2015, while I was looking through the web page searching for competitions for high school students, I accidentally found the Science Olympiad. Different from normal paper exam, Science Olympiad emphasized more on hand-on experience. I decided that this a good opportunity for our students to apply and practice the scientific knowledge they learned in PRISMS. I’m glad that our students are enthusiastic about this event,” said Dr.Chen.
Tommy Lin has participated in Science Olympiad four times, and won two gold medals and one silver medal in the Chemistry Lab event.
“Chem Lab is an event in which students answer questions and perform experiments related to specific topics of chemistry. This year’s question is Thermodynamics and Gas Laws. I can see that the questions in the state round are trickier than those of the regional round. For example, today’s event involved a concept called Energy of Activated Complex. Neither I nor my partner has heard of this term. However, although this event is challenging, I’m still satisfied with my performance,” said Tommy.
Tommy also gave advice to future participants, “I think that accumulating basic knowledges is the best way to prepare for this event.”
Science Olympiad also has several “impound events,” for which participants need to bring pre-constructed device to the testing site. One of this year’s impound events is Robot Arm. Savva won sixth place in Robot Arm with his partner Melinda.
“In the Robot Arm event, we need to design and construct a robot arm that can pick up pennies, flip them, and drop them onto the designated target area. While most teams used commercial robotic kits like VEX or Lego Mindstorms, we made the robot arm completely by ourselves. I modified Mr.Kemp’s robot arm design for the sophomore engineering class into a scaled-up version. I used six servomotors controlled by turnable potentiometers.”
Savva has made significant improvements to his robot arm between the regional and final round. “I improved the mechanism of the claw by adding an additional motor, which enabled the claw to dispense pennies continuously. I also updated the program so that the robot arm can drop the coins without direct manual control. I think I’ll definitely spend more time on the control sequence in the future.”
Dr.Chen was very satisfied with his students’ performance. “This is only the fourth time for PRISMS to participate in a Science Olympiad, while other schools have been doing this for decades. Also, most of our team members are freshmen and sophomore, who are less experienced. It was quite an achievement that PRISMS ranked the fourth place in the regional round and advanced into the state round. I really appreciate the amount of time and efforts our students devoted to this competition,” commented by Dr.Chen. “I believe that our team with do a better job next time because of the experience we accumulated.”
In this Science Olympiad, Mary and Tommy won fifth place in material science; Savva and Melinda won sixth place in Robot Arm; Frank and Joshua won sixth place in Electric Vehicle.