Science Olympiad: District Tournament

Well, as you probably noticed from the title, this last Saturday was the Science Olympiad District Tournament. And I think that's what I will write about in this post, because it was definitely the highlight of the week (along with my Algebra II test score.) Anyway, on Saturday I woke up at around eight o'clock so I could get to Davis High School by around 8:40. The competition doesn't actually start until 9:00, but I wanted to find all of my events in advance, so I didn't get lost trying to find something. After I got there, since I had the Dynamic Planet event first hour, I went directly too it. My partner and I had never practiced for the event, and I pulled together a few pages of notes on freshwater rivers and lakes the night before. In addition, once we started the test, we realized that there was another problem. The test wasn't on freshwater rivers and lakes, it was on volcanoes. So, we went about doing the test, and every time we had to guess we would play rock, paper, scissors to decide which answer to choose. But, I think we actually knew the answer to quite a few of the questions. Directly after that I walked back to the homeroom class, and volunteered to enter in Pentathlon, another event which we didn't prepare for, and was able to do that event along with 3 other team mates. Pentathlon is where each person on the team has to do a physical challenge (like dribbling a ball, or jump roping, etc,) and a mental task (answering questions in a random field of science.) I answered questions on fossils. Then at the end there is a group physical task (ours was with a hoola hoop,) and a group mental task (ours was on famous scientific discoveries.) We did pretty well, I thought, but we were all sure we missed some questions. After Pentathlon came Junkyard Challenge. As I have mentioned previously, Junkyard Challenge is probably my favorite Science Olympiad event. And we were not just competing in this event at district to earn a medal. We were competing for a spot on the Junkyard Challenge team. The challenge was to build a bridge with the longest span that could hold a ball. You could get bonus points by holding extra tennis balls, golf balls, and plastic golf balls. But the hard part: It all has to be made out of toothpicks, plates, string, cups, bowls, tape, paper, popsicle sticks, and a few other items. Therefore the name Junkyard Challenge. My bridge was about fifteen meters long, which beat out the second place team. Their bridge was probably about 6 meters long. So me and my partner had really won. During the awards ceremony, I found out that I got gold in all three events! And overall as a team, of the twelve events we entered, we won eighteen medals. Fairfield remains the best. So now I guess I will be preparing for regionals. Hopefully we do as well there as we did at district.