Science Olympiad

Yesterday (Saturday), I went to the District competition for Science Olympiad. At, this I competed in 2 of my 3 events; I competed in Compute This! and Storm the Castle.

My partner and I won first place in Storm the Castle, but it wasn't because our machine was better than any other. It was because we had graphs showing how to use it. You get scored on how well the trebuchet does, but almost half the points are in the graphs. We were the only team at District to actually have those graphs, but I expect we'll see more prepared teams at the State competition. In order for us to do well there, we're going to have to build a better machine. We need one that throws more than twice as far as the one we have now which will be quite difficult seeing as how the one we have now was already difficult to figure out how to build. At the District competition, we could have also done a little better. My partner looked at the graphs wrong when we were setting up the target and didn't put it far enough out. We missed both times and I didn't notice his error until after the first shot. I looked at the graph that he had made and was immediately lost. It took awhile to figure out what his graph meant. I think that I need to do the graph next time. We won, but we could have done better.

There were a lot of problems with Compute This!. The first one involves my partner. He doesn't like me giving him advice while he works. He finds it annoying even though he does the exact same thing when it's my turn to work. I don't say anything when he annoys me though. It's frustrating sometimes to do this event with him. Another problem was that the test was not written right. In the rules it states that there can be up to 5 questions and 1 graph. The test at District had 10 questions and with the way they had worded it, 5 graphs. Afterwords, they told us that they intended for there only to be 1 graph, but it was worded poorly. The guy who had written the test had never done it before. I was ticked off about that. We got second place because we were not able to answer the last few questions because it took me so long to change the graph into 5 separate data tables and graphs. I did that because I was following the instructions exactly. We got full points on the graph.

Overall, I think that we did pretty good. At the District level, they don't announce school winners because it's more of a practice competition. We do it to prepare ourselves for the next upcoming competitions. We only received photocopy certificates, but we will be able to earn medals at Regionals and also at State. I've got a lot of work to do involving the building events: Storm the Castle and Mission Possible.