Science Olympiad competitions

Science Olympiad competitions are a lot like academic track meets. They consist of a series of team events that reflect the ever-changing nature of genetics, earth science, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, engineering, technology and more. By combining events from all disciplines, Science Olympiad encourages a wide cross-section of students to get involved and be active, hands-on group participants in academic studies, projects, engineering, and collaboration.

On Saturday, February 10th, a group of students at White County High School, who are also part of the school’s Science Club and honors sciences, competed in their very first Regional Science Olympiad in school history. Coaches Chelsa Burch and Wesley Martin, who also serve as the sponsors for the club, have constantly been looking for ways to provide students more opportunities to be involved in extracurricular sciences and events. Martin says “Our goal every year is to discover new possibilities and opportunities for our students. Keira Stanley, a senior at WCHS and student captain for the Olympiad team, was determined to have our school be involved in this event and helped organize our student groups to prepare, engineer projects, and be self-driven to study and compete”. With her determination, and students spending several weeks working after school, the WCHS Science Olympiad team entered Saturday with the hope that hard work could pay off.

“We didn’t know how everything would work,” Martin said about the competition. “There are a lot of rules and guidelines that are involved in each specific event. With this being our first year, we encouraged students to do their best to be competitive, but also to gain experiences that can help future WCHS students be more successful in these events”. With the rain not slowing them down, students traveled back and forth between several locations across TTU’s campus and proved they could still be successful while learning from their first competition.

Of the 12 twelve teams that competed in Division C (High School) events at TTU, White County HS finished in the Top 6 in 8 out of the 12 events that they participated in.

Here were the results:

Codebusters - 4th Place

Ecology - 4th Place

Flight (Project) - 3rd Place

Forensics - 4th Place               

Forestry - 3rd Place

Geologic Mapping - 4th Place

Microbe Mission - 6th Place

Scrambler (Project) - 5th Place

Burch and Martin were very impressed with the success of their students and proud of their achievements. “This is what it’s all about,” said Martin after the award ceremony. “Our students hopefully made some fun memories, worked extremely well together, and developed some skills along the way. We couldn’t be more proud of them.”