Science Olympiad Starts with Two Strong Wins

Ricky Sayer, Staff Writer|February 25, 2014

It has been a busy and crazy few weeks for science Olympiad members. They have driven through 5 states for competitions, been on a “jumbotron,” stayed up long nights studying, bought two pies, slept on the floor of buses, eaten Chinese food, tried to travel through long confusing tunnels, given emotional speeches, and fought to make there rube Goldberg device work all while studying for midterms. But most importantly, they have started their season with two 5^th place finishes at two very different competitions. Coming off a second place finish at the national competition in 2013, Harriton returned to the same site this year only to compete in an invitational competition that they hope will kick off their most successful year ever. They have one goal in mind- to win nationals.

The first competition that students attended was the Wright State Invitational Competition in western Ohio. At the competition a number of teams come to compete, all bringing 15 people to compete in 23 events over the course of 8 hours. Spirits were high as students made the 10-hour trek through PA, West Virginia, and Ohio. During the ride, Harry Smith, Co-captain of the team, spoke about what students do to prepare. He said that, “everybody’s studying, taking a look at their own note binders, making cheat cheats, researching any last minute factoids.” This also included doing anything to keep comfortable on the long ten-hour bus ride where the bus was full, so full that the nurse had to sit in the seat next to the driver on the steps. Harry also talked about the vibe and how much people were preparing for the competition. “When you are so close to a competition, so close to a challenge, people get more focused and more energized about things, they work harder, I appreciate all that hard work in the last week”

Unique to the Wright State Competition is that Harriton went “Split Squad.” This means that they bring two teams to the competition. Alex Herriot, the other co-captain of the team, mentioned that “the reason we do it is to get more people competing…if we really wanted to win Wright State we would field one team, we field two just to get people experienced.” They also told me that the two teams are well balanced. Alex also said “teams who run a varsity squad by default really should be beating us regularly.” The thing is they do not. Harriton finished in fifth place at the competition where they faced off against some of the best teams from PA, Ohio, New York and Texas.

Alex mentioned specifically how the building events went. “The building events went well from what we could expect from them, we went into this past week knowing a lot of work still needed to be done… I am satisfied with the performance especially with mission (possible),… the balsa builds were quite successful… we are are still going to work on everything, Matt needs to keep building his booms, the small army of gliders people need to keep pumping out gliders and I need to help build everything else.”

Aside from coming in 5^th place at the competition Harriton also proved itself by beating the reigning national champion Solon who came in 6^th place. “I was really surprised however I wouldn’t take there performance as any indication of how they will do later in the year especially because there on split squad just like us and we only beat them by 4 points or so it’s a minor celebration,” said Alex Herriot.

After the competition, a few people talked about their experience. Gideon Haber, a senior, felt that “it was a good lesson for the team and good motivation to work even harder.” Melissa Krouse felt that, “the trip had been awesome- everyone did a very nice job and it was very fun to watch.”

The first competition was an unusual experience for Harriton freshmen that went from competing in four or five events at Welsh Valley to competing in one or two events at Harriton. They may have been in fewer events, but many felt that even though they weren’t competing, they were having a great time. Ethan Ginsberg said “I think it is kind of nice that we really feel that we are on a team and a winning team too, rather than being on a team where we are really not all that close together and we don’t do very well. Harriton is a lot better atmosphere because everyone works together and everyone sticks together, unlike Welsh Valley where everyone met separate rooms on separate days. Here at Harriton, we meet every single day, all in the same room, so we’re are all much closer and we all stick together to teach each other. Nobody is ever left on their own in a single event, and the result is us doing a lot better.”

Harry Smith added “this is much more serious than it is at Welsh Valley. Welsh Valley was a lot of fun and we did great things, but here at Harriton we come to do fun work, but most importantly we come to do work and we’re coming to win.”

The next weekend, Harriton again journeyed to a competition. This time they were going to the Twin Tiers Invitational in Athens, which is in northern Pennsylvania. At the Twin Tiers Competition, Harriton students faced off against the top teams from New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which included Solon. It is very rare for Harriton to compete in this competition, so they only fielded one team of underclassmen instead of going split squad like at Wright State. Harry smith elaborated, “at every other competition we usually compete with a mix of upperclassman and a few underclassman. [At this competition,] we have built a team of only underclassman, freshman and sophomores. We have done very well in recent years, finishing in the top five in the past six or seven years except for one.” Herriot added, “I think this really shows how much effort our underclassman put in and how much a part of the team they are.” Harry added “this competition is no joke, its actually one of the hardest competitions to go to and we put full confidence in our freshman and sophomores to be able to match and maybe beat every one of the other teams.” Harriton again did very well at the competition medaling in 11 events and coming up in 5^th place at the competition.

The co-captains mentioned thatthey thought the Harriton Science Olympiad team is special and different from the other teams in the country. Harry said “we let anyone who wants to join our team join our club and augment the power of our minds.” Alex added that, “one of the differences is we are one of the very few teams that doesn’t do something called cuts where a lot of other teams have tryouts- they will have 17 people in competition for the year and two of those people will be alternates the other 15 are on the competition team and they will actually assign events to people. We however do not have a 17-person team we have closer to 40 or 50. That is something that makes us different from all of the other teams in the nation. Harry also said “we have been hitting the books, we’ve been studying harder than we’ve ever studied before.”

Harriton Science Olympiad’s next competition is regionals on march 5^th, make sure to come out and show your support!

Here are individual results:

Wright State Competition

Anatomy 5^th place Gideon Haber, Sarah Root

Astronomy 8^th place Royce lee and Rafael Haber

Boomilever 1^st place matt Zhao and Lucas Serlin

Compound machines 5^th place Alex Herriott, Gideon Haber 4^th place, John Powell, Steven Lorenz

Elastic launch gliders 4^th place Miranda Wager, Nathan Wagman 5^th place Miriam Lee, Emmanuelle Bonin

Forensics 1^st place Gideon Haber, Diyita Sharma

Geo mapping 3^rd place Harry Smith, Connor Todd

Maglev 7^th place Alex Herriott, Lorenzo Solon

Materials science 7^th place Etan Ginsberg Eleanor Mayes, 4^th place Eric Frank, John Powell