NJIT Hosts New Jersey Science Olympiad Regional Tournament over Winter Break
Campus came back to life as middle and high school students from New Jersey gathered on campus to participate in the 15th regional tournament of the New Jersey Science Olympiad at NJIT. They came prepared for a long day, carrying stacks of water bottles, boards for presentations and their built structures to showcase.
The New Jersey Science Olympiad started in 1993 as the New Jersey Chapter of the National Science Olympiad. Students competed for bids at the state championship, which will be held in March and then subsequently for advancement to the national tournament in May at Wichita State University.
“We have 23 high school teams and 14 middle school teams, so what a great opportunity to showcase the spaces on campus, especially the Makerspace, which is being used for the hands-on events where students build their structures, and then they get tested,” said Kerry Eberhardt, director for program operations and outreach of NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs.
This is the first tournament that was back in-person since the pandemic. Throughout the day, students competed in events that pertained to anatomy and physiology, the solar system, rocks and minerals, meteorology and astronomy, but also events that asked students to bring built bridges to test their strength, wheeled vehicles to see how far they could run and even roller coasters.
“The Science Olympiad provides an experience that’s very different from anything else you're going to do in the sciences,” said Michael Del Corso, treasurer of the New Jersey Science Olympiad Executive Committee. “With sciences, most of the time you’re working on paper or computers. Here, we're asking you to apply your knowledge to a variety of tasks that span the scientific disciplines.
“While there are exams on very specific topics, like anatomy, cell biology, or chemistry lab, there's also engineering type events such as the wheeled vehicle, the scrambler and the roller coaster, where you really challenge the student to apply their cross discipline knowledge to a task, and that's pretty unique across science, STEM programs.”
The Science Olympiad is an event where individuals compete in groups, so they compete within an event as a group of two or three, but they're also competing as a team of 15 students to collectively have their result as a team. It follows the same model to that of a track meet — there are different events and competitors get rewarded for their specific event, which contributes to an overall team score.
High school juniors from Bergen County Academies, Abigail Kumar and Riddhi Lamba, left NJIT excited as they saw their bridge pass all the tests with stupendous results.
“I think it was a really rewarding experience because we were really stressed about it, and we watched a lot of videos,” said Lamba. “We asked for a lot of help from teachers, and we were really scared that a lot of the things that we were doing wouldn't work out because we had never done a challenge like this before. In the process of making it, I feel like we both learned a lot, and we both had a really good time. Seeing it do so well was really rewarding.”
Both Kumar and Lamba see themselves pursuing engineering careers in the future. In the same room, helping them set up their bridge to prepare for the competition was Luther Lawson, a student at NJIT, who’s studying computer psychology.
Lawson was one of the many volunteers in the event, but for him the event became a full circle moment as he also participated in the Science Olympiad when he was in middle school.
“The minute when I saw that they were putting up bridges, and they signed in their bridges, I'm looking and I'm like, ‘I did this in middle school!’ All the memories just started flowing, I remember building it, having the design plan,” said Lawson. “In a design class, we had to use our computers to design the dimensions and with what we were going to build it. After that we had to put it to reality, our bridge didn't hold up as well, but we came in fourth place.
“Coming here and seeing these students do it, it's actually pretty fun. It brings back good memories for me.”
