Montana Science Olympiad Set for April 19 in Bozeman
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On Friday, April 19, approximately 900 middle and high school students from 80 teams across Montana will converge on Montana State University’s campus in Bozeman for the Montana Science Olympiad 2024 State Tournament.
Among those students will be teams from Chinook. The event features competitions in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines.
According to Chinook High School Science Instructor, Mr. Aaron Chriss, this year’s representation consists of both high school and junior high students. “Students qualify for their events based on seniority and the help they have performed in fundraising. From there, they choose what events they will compete in,” Chriss stated.
For middle schoolers, competition will take place in five categories, and under each of those umbrellas are individual events: Earth and Space Science (Fossils, Meteorology, Road Scholar), Physical Science and Chemistry (Crime Busters, Optics, Wind Power), Technology and Engineering Design (Tower Building, Wheeled Vehicle), Inquiry and Nature of Science (Codebusters, Experimental Design, Write It Do It), and Life, Personal, and Social Science (Microbe Mission, Forestry, Anatomy and Physiology).
From Chinook Junior High, Trent Thomas will compete in Tower Building, Cynnloch Gibson and Sydney Bowles will apply their skills in Crime Busters, and two teams will tackle Codebusters: Abby Danley and Laura Danley will pair up, as will Bridger Billmayer and Wacee Simenson.
Tower Building will challenge Thomas to design and build a structure, or tower, that meets the requirements specified to achieve the highest structural efficiency.
In the Crime Busters event, Gibson and Bowles will perform a series of tests after receiving a scenario, a collection of evidence, and possible suspects. The test results, along with other evidence, will be used to solve a crime.
The final four Codebusters will analyze and decode encrypted messages using cryptanalysis techniques for historical and modern advanced ciphers.
On the high school side, the same categories exist, but the individual events differ in some cases. Earth and Space Science (Astronomy, Fossils), Physical Science and Chemistry (Chemistry Lab, Optics, Wind Power), Technology and Engineering Design (Tower Building, Scrambler), Inquiry and Nature of Science (Code Busters, Experimental Design, Fermi Questions, Write It Do It), and Life, Personal, and Social Science (Microbe Mission, Forestry, Anatomy and Physiology) will give structure to the Olympiad’s competition.
For their events, Lance Pitkanen (junior) and Jameson Nordboe (freshmen) will apply their skill in Scrambler, Kegan Green (sophomore) and Wyatt Olmstead (sophomore) will compete in Fossils, Mara Edwards (sophomore) will do battle in Write It Do It, and Olivia Bartlett and Brooke Fetter will enter as a duo in Experimental Design.
In the Scrambler event, Pitkanen and Nordboe will design, build, and test a mechanical device, which uses the energy from a falling mass, to transport an egg along a straight track as quickly as possible but then stops as close to the center of a Terminal Barrier without breaking the egg.
On the other hand, Green and Olmstead will identify and classify fossils and demonstrate their knowledge of ancient life. Their tasks will be related to interpretation of past environments and ecosystems, adaptations, evolutionary relationships, and the use of fossils in dating and correlating rock units.
As a Write It Do It competitor, Edwards will write a description of an object and outline how to build it. Another participant will attempt to construct the object from this description.
Finally, Experimental Design will challenge Bartlett and Fetter to design, conduct, and report the findings of an experiment entirely on-site.
Using their talent and applying knowledge of STEM principles, students have the opportunity to earn medals, and the school with the highest cumulative score wins the state championship. The state champions are eligible to compete at the national tournament, which will be hosted this spring at Michigan State University.
