{"id":111135,"date":"2016-04-05T13:05:59","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T17:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?post_type=school-college-post&p=111135"},"modified":"2016-04-05T13:05:59","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T17:05:59","slug":"clas-sponsors-high-school-science-olympiad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2016\/04\/clas-sponsors-high-school-science-olympiad\/","title":{"rendered":"CLAS Sponsors High School Science Olympiad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forty-three teams of high-schoolers from schools across Connecticut competed on Saturday in 23 scientific events in the state\u2019s annual Science Olympiad. The students flocked to Storrs to vie for glory, bragging rights, and a trip to the national competition.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s event, sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, drew a record number of students: nearly 1,000, almost double the participation in 2013.<\/p>\n

The surge was thanks in part to the more than 30 volunteers \u2013 most of them students, faculty, staff and alumni of UConn \u2013 who have been a part of the program since it first came to the University.<\/p>\n

UConn alumna Treese Campbell ’02 (CLAS), who received her Ph.D. in chemistry at UConn and now works for United Technologies, has been volunteering for the past ten years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes a lot of volunteer work,\u201d said Campbell. \u201cThat\u2019s the way the whole Science Olympiad works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really happy that UConn hosts this. It\u2019s really expensive and it takes about 100 adult volunteers, so when [CLAS] partnered with us about ten years ago, it really allowed us to expand and do all the events,\u201d said Cindy Wilbur, secretary of Connecticut\u2019s Science Olympiad.<\/p>\n

\"Students
Students put on their lab coats and solve problems about kinetics and stoichiometry. (Photo courtesy of Sydney Lauro ’17 (CLAS))<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Science Olympiad is a nationwide, nonprofit organization that promotes science education with a tournament-style competition that students spend months preparing for.<\/p>\n

The competition includes three kinds of events: lab events; content events, which are written tests; and engineering challenges, said Wilbur.<\/p>\n

Events include bridge building, where students design and construct a bridge to support a 15kg weight, a forensics challenge that has students analyze evidence to\u00a0identify the guilty party, and even protein modeling, which involves using a computer to construct models of proteins and then solve problems about protein structures.<\/p>\n

The event is sprawling, with events held in academic buildings all over campus. Volunteers led students to events in Torrey Life Sciences, the Chemistry Building, Oak Hall, ITE, Hawley Armory, and the event\u2019s headquarters in Laurel Hall.<\/p>\n

Each event is supervised by a volunteer. First-year volunteer Stephanie Phillips, a graduate student in the Center for Integrative Geoscience, led the hydrogeology event.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got to plan the event and everything,\u201d said Phillips. \u201c[The students] are doing a three-point problem, which is how you figure out the gradient of the way water is moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former Olympian Katherine Bell is now a freshman environmental sciences major at UConn.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always really liked [Science Olympiad] because I got to study subjects I enjoyed outside of school, and I liked the feeling of competition,\u201d Bell said. \u201cI think that\u2019s one of the reason\u2019s I came back to help; I like the atmosphere. It\u2019s a unique opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students like Bell and Jenn Newton, a freshman mechanical engineering major, are already planning on helping out for their remaining three years at UConn.<\/p>\n

Sean Jones has been a regular volunteer judge at the Olympiad ever since his niece participated several years ago. \u201c[My niece] didn\u2019t do it the next year, but I kept on coming. I\u2019ve been doing it ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jones commented about how great it was to see students just having fun and not getting upset if they lost an event. \u201cYou see the kids\u2019 faces, they\u2019re all so excited,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

At the end of the competition, all the students and volunteers gathered for a closing ceremony and presentation, put on by Academic Assistant in Physics Dave Perry with physics major and former Olympian Hope Whitelock, a sophomore physics major.<\/p>\n

Whitelock used to spend every Wednesday afternoon in high school preparing to compete in the Science Olympiad. Her school took it very seriously, and they would even go to the invitational at Yale every year to prepare for the state competition at UConn.<\/p>\n

Whitelock\u2019s favorite events were the engineering challenges, like building a bridge or a robot arm.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes, we failed miserably; then sometimes, rarely, [what we built] would work, and we\u2019d be really happy,” she says. \u201cIt was such great fun when I was doing it. I want other people to have that too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty-three teams of high school students from across Connecticut competed on Saturday, April 2, in the state\u2019s annual Science Olympiad, to vie for glory and a trip to the national competition. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":111136,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1858],"class_list":["post-111135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 07:29:20","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/111136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111135"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=111135"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=111135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}