This past Saturday, the Newman Science Olympiad team competed in the Regional competition. Waking up early, they boarded the bus at 6:30 to travel to Nicholls State University for competition. After some initial setbacks, with many of their key scientists busy due to Saint Patrick’s day, illness, and other commitments, they made some last minute changes to the competition line up. Due to some unexpected delays, they arrived at the competition half an hour late. Rushing off to the first round of competition, the Science Olympiad students competed in a slew of events. Throughout the day, these included Astronomy, Chem Lab, Towers, Helicopters, Ecology, Disease Detectives, Herpetology and many more! Coming together to witness the towers event, the team was crushed when their tower was disqualified from judging due to its base being slightly too small. With creative engineering, the team was able to break supports on the tower, and create a new base with the tower held up by an extra tower inserted horizontally along the base of the original tower. Despite it being able to hold the second greatest mass in sand at 10,001 grams, the team was still disqualified because the tower was not fully assembled at the time of entry, in one complete piece. After a long day of science, the team gathered in the auditorium for the awards ceremony. The team overall placed 7th overall, falling just short of the 5th place cut off for state qualification. However, despite missing some key scientists there were several impressive finishes!

Astronomy – 1st place – Lia Bu (9th) and David Adler (9th)

Ecology – 1st place – Floris Kuiper (11th) and Camille Patton (11th)

Game On – 1st place – Dylon Hill (12th) and Abhishek Jani (12th)

Rocks and Minerals – 3rd place – Michael Massiha (12th) and Floris Kuiper (11th)

Remote Sensing – 3rd place – John Gainey (12th) and Griffin Descant (10th)

The team is anxiously awaiting news from the Science Olympiad organizers to hear if any other teams dropped out which would allow them to compete in the state competition, which takes place this Saturday.