Success and Failure at the Science Olympiad Regional Competition

This last weekend was the Science Olympiad Regional Tournament. I had been excited for it all week, because I would be competing in 4 events for medals (Towers, Bottle Rockets, Optics, and Write it Do it) and practicing for no medal in one event (Dynamic Planet.) On Saturday, I got to the competition at about 8:30. After talking to everyone, I went to my first even, Write it Do it. When we got there, they brought us all in a room where we would write how the object looked, but they didn't show us the object, and instead asked if we had any questions. That was lucky, because I had to go to the bathroom and only missed the question time, and not part of the event itself. The object was an insane mix of k'nex, wiffle balls, pipe cleaners, straws, popsicle sticks, index cards, and clothespins. After the Write it Do it event was over, I had a little break while my partner worked on building the object from my description. After that, I went to Optics, and me and my partner started working on the test. I think that we did nicely on the test portion, but we failed the laser shoot. We decided to just guess, and not do the calculations, and we missed by about 6 cm. After Optics, I went to Dynamic Planet, which I hadn't really prepared for at all, and pretty much guessed on every question. But I couldn't medal anyway. Then I had an hour of free time where I primarily watched other schools break their towers (I thought that was pretty fun, because they were all getting scores of three and four, and I planned to get at least a twelve.) When the time came to test my 5.65 g tower, I was excited because we had already tested one I had made exactly like this, and it got a score of 11 point something. So I expected this one, which was even better built, to score a twelve or more. We started testing, and surprisingly, after only a few scoop fulls of rock salt, the tower collapsed! This was practically impossible to happen, and it broke in a really strong spot. My theory is that the piece had broken before the competition, probably in transportation, and I just hadn't noticed (it is really hard to tell.) I was pretty disappointed about that, but I went to bottle rockets, and launched my rocket, (which had got about twenty, then landed in a tree, so I expected a twenty two or so out of it) but, since it was so windy the bottle rocket shot off course quickly, and didn't backslide at apogee as fast as it was supposed too. It landed several hundred feet away, with a score of about 18 seconds, which still was not that bad. There was a large break after bottle rockets, and then it was time for the awards. They do the awards in alphabetical order, so they mentioned Bottle Rockets first, and I got a silver medal. The winning rocket got about 21 seconds, but it had a fin thing on the top that the judges didn't know if was legal or not, but they let it pass at regionals. I didn't win anything in Optics, which was disappointing, but not a surprise, because our laser shoot was so bad. We didn't win anything for Towers either. When Write it Do it came around, I was informed that we had by far the best model, and had lost our gold medal because while I was gone from the event, they explained that you should cross out any wrong words in the description with one line, and I had not heard and scribbled mine out, which got us a lot of penalties. However, we still got a silver medal. No golds this time, compared to my five or so golds at district. But at least now I know what to prepare for for the state competition.