State Science Olympiad

Well I know that a lot of you don’t really care about Science Olympiad, and some of you may be even bitter towards it, but that doesn’t mean it still does not mean a lot to me. This essay is simply the one that I turned into Mrs. Brinkerhoff for my term project. All it really states is what the title says, what happened at state for me, and how I prepared to do my best.

State Science Olympiad

State Science Olympiad is much the same as it has always been. One of the major things that set this year apart from that of others was mainly the coaching. When normally we have trained with four coaches, this year we trained with one. We only had one teacher acting as coach this year with all of the other coaching done by volunteers to put it in simpler terms. Many of us thought that this would lead to our downfall, along with the seemingly less amount of students trying out. But we managed once again to prove that Fairfield Junior is still strong and is still the Utah Science Olympiad Juggernaut.

This year I competed in three events: Scrambler, Simple Machines, and Rocks & Minerals. I placed gold in all three of my events, receiving an almost perfect score in Simple Machines as well. In Scrambler our distance to shoot for was exactly 12 meters. We managed to pull this distance off within 4.7 seconds- look at that- 12 meters! We didn’t get quite as close to the wall as we had hoped for but in training for nationals we hope to solve that problem. But our overall score was good enough to pull off gold.

In Simple Machines, we didn’t have quite the coaching situation that we would have hoped for. (Last year in Nationals this same partnership pulled off 10th place) But we made do with an extremely willing parent volunteer, she tried to keep us in shape to do our best. Right before state Mr. Erickson got out all of the Simple Machines from district and let us run through and try to get it all right, (We bombed district quite badly) and this seemed to help us enough to get every single question right on the state test. (Thus, pulling off gold once again in yet another event)

In Rocks and Minerals we have always been known at Fairfield Junior High to have the best possible coach you could get. This was still true this year, but unfortunately she would no coach us! So we had three amazing coaches that had previously been trained by her and had ranked nationally in the event. They did a wonderful job coaching us, and now have joined us in training for nationals with Mrs. Nelson. (And once again we got gold)

So overall I had a really good experience at the State competition doing well in all of my events, and being there for all of my team-mates.