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KIDS: Science Rules!
(festive percussion music)
(cheering)
JON PEDERSEN: Well, Science Olympiad is very much like
the sport's olympiad,
in that teams compete for honors and medals,
golden, silver bronze, actually to six places.
We also compete for a national title,
and it's all about building a team to compete
in different, specific events,
that are all related to science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics.
It is large.
2000 participants, almost, from again 49 states.
- Nebraska!
- California!
- Texas!
- Kentucky!
- Japan!
PEDERSEN: You know, to me, this is how science, technology,
engineering, mathematics ought to be taught,
and getting our kids engaged in.
SAAN PATEL: It's just helped me love science more
throughout the years,
and I just can't live without it now.
THOMAS DRAPER: It's been awesome.
CAM PIKAART: It's been really awesome.
NANDAN DAVE: I mean, we've had a great time.
I think it was pretty dramatic,
so I'd call it a win.
STARTER: Three, two, one, zero.
(bright rock music)
JAKE WINEMILLER: They're trying to make a rocket
stay in the air as long as possible
without any parachute.
It's a great engineering problem.
They could solve it fairly easy with a parachute,
but no, they have to just fence centers of mass,
center of gravity.
It really drives them to start thinking about physics,
and the real world.
It's your rocket, keep hanging on,
I'm going to rotate it up, it's your rocket.
It's my rocket.
Okay, any last adjustments?
Three, two, one, zero.
I'll tell you what I love about this,
because I am a teacher,
this motivates kids to get into pure and applied science
and technology, and that's what I'm all about.
I love it.
Three, two, one, zero.
Zero.
Zero.
Zero.
Zero.
MANLEY MIDGET: This is mission impossible.
It's an event where students take a lot of junk,
and then make something out of it.
So, this year they're dropping
a golf ball into the device,
but the device has to lift golf balls,
and put them in a scoring container.
But along the way five forms of energy,
and the trick is,
you have to do it in a certain amount of time,
which they did not know until they got here today.
GRIFFIN KARR: We have a whole bunch of these little things
we call me-me's set up,
and they're chains of mechanical to electrical changes,
where each motor flips a switch,
which causes the next motor to turn on,
so it's very efficient.
All right, battery dead?
STUDENT: Problem.
KARR: We've been doing a lot of tests with this,
so the batteries are probably dead.
We're going to change the batteries out.
That's why we do test runs,
to make sure that things like that don't happen.
In three, two, one.
(electrical buzzing)
KARR: Much better.
TEACHER: I like this event so much because
it takes students through problem solving.
They go through the engineering process to solve problems.
They really like it, it's hands on,
they can be creative, they really get engaged.
You almost have to make the students stop.
They love this, they want to do this event all the time.
(bright piano music)
LIN WOZNIEWSKI: This is forensics.
That's what they're supposed to do is determine:
who did it?
And the neat thing about this that
is that it's all logic.
They have to put all of the evidence together
to determine who really did it.
It's a very devious crime.
DEJA KIRK: Somebody has stolen money,
and put something on fire.
We're trying to figure out what these substances are,
and we just have different chemicals to help us out:
acid, bases, etcetera.
It's pretty cool.
And we have blood samples too.
WOZNIEWSKI: If they get it, it's a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, if they decide to just go with the
surface evidence, they're not going to get it right.
They have to think about it very deeply.
BRUCE WIEGAND: This is an air trajectory event,
where students are to design and construct a device
that's capable of launching a ball
to a distance of eight meters.
And what they want to do is be able
to shoot far and close, with a great deal of accuracy.
So, they're trying to get within millimeters of a target.
STUDENT 1: Short target.
STUDENT 2: Three, two...
(cheering)
We had a bellow system,
so when it pushes down, it comes back up,
and we had a hammer that falls on it.
WIEGAND: There's a lot of education in this.
They learn how to graph,
they learn how to predict,
they have to learn about experimentation
and calibration of a device.
They try something, it may not work at first,
so they have to try something else.
It develops critical thinking skills.
It develops engineering skills,
and they learn how to do ballistic curves.
TEACHER: We are up.
OFFICIAL: Oh, nice shot.
THOMAS DRAPER: We have to use the Pythagorean Theorem
to figure out where the distances should be,
and the angle which it should be at.
CAM PIKAART: Yeah, we had to use it for the bucket shot.
We had to use the Pythagorean Theorem
to figure out what the distance between us
and the bucket was.
And it worked.
Three, two...
(cheering)
TEACHER: Beautiful.
(bright piano music)
KRYSTAL JAMISON: We have a partner,
and we build a bridge together,
and we test it on the hoppers that are back there,
and then you put a block on top,
and a chain that goes down in bucket,
and then you're testing how much weight it can hold.
So, once it breaks, then you stop testing.
OFFICIAL: Okay, let me check it first before you go.
That looks good.
JAMISON: And then, to calculate your score,
it's in efficiency,
so you take how much it weighed in grams.
So, a max of 15,000 grams,
divided by the mass of your bridge,
and then you get efficiency.
Hopefully a good one.
TAMMAYA SHRIVASTAVA: It's been stressful but fun at the same time.
A lot of long hours put into building
a small balsa structure, just to have it break in a minute,
but it's rewarding to have...
JUSTIN ***: It's all worth it at the end.
SHRIVASTAVA: Yeah, it's all worth it.
TEACHER: Great job.
(applause)
GERALD PUTZ: Everybody loves to be best at something,
that's a natural human trait.
There's always a component,
for all 46 of the events, of problem solving.
Some hands on component,
where students have to demonstrate
their knowledge and skill.
A lot of kids don't figure they're capable
of doing this, until they get engaged
in a real activity, and they find out,
I can do this.
And they end up going on to higher levels of aspiration.
So, this is incredibly motivational
for just millions of students over 30 years.
We've seen the passion that develops.
ANNOUNCER: In first place, our national champion,
from the state of California, Troy High School.
(applause)