About...

Science Olympiad

Science Olympiad is a nationwide interscholastic contest for middle and high school students that takes place in two divisions: Division B, for middle and junior high schools and Division C, for high schools. Schools send teams of up to 15 students plus alternates to compete against other teams in their division. Each student competes in a subset of the 23 events offered for their division. Students can earn individual medals for their events but also contribute to the overall team score. The top teams in each division are allowed to advance to the next level of competition. Science Olympiad consists of three levels of competition: Regional, State, and National.

Purdue Science Olympiad Club

This year Purdue University will be hosting a regional competition. Science Olympiad Club organizes the competition and runs the events. We need many volunteers to write tests, judge competitions, proctor tests, and help out wherever needed during the day of the competition. A background in science is not necessary to volunteer.

For more information, please refer to the Links page.

Events

Events cover a wide range of topics in science and engineering, and can be carried out in many different ways. For instance, to compete in Scrambler, a popular event in years past, the object was to build and bring to competition a mobile vehicle designed to transport an egg from one end of a track to a point as close as possible to a barrier at the opposite end without breaking the egg; rules prescribed the placement of the egg so that it would be the first point to hit the barrier if the vehicle went too far. In another event, Remote Sensing, students are to be given a set of satellite imagery and other remote sensing data, and using these along with the knowledge and resources they bring with them, measure, analyze and interpret data to solve problems of varying complexity.

The lists of events for Division C and Division B have a few overlaps, but even when two events in different divisions have the same name, their rules often include minor variations to reflect the difference in presumed age and level of education of the competitors.

This page was last modified: 07:14:42 Sat 24 Jan 2009 (UTC)