On Saturday, Feb. 4, the MHS Science Olympiad team participated in a regional competition at Lindenwood University.
Val Mertz, science teacher, is a co-sponsor of Science Olympiad. The other co-sponsor is Mike Tevlin.
Science Olympiad is a competition in which students do three things, Mertz said. They can take a written test, build something and test the apparatus they built and they can demonstrate their lab skills.
In a Science Olympiad event, there are 18 competitions; the MHS team placed in six and placed 9th overall.
Students prepared for the events in various ways. Mertz said that students have to study on their own, but that they also talk to teachers who have specialty area in an event the students will participate in. They talked to science teachers Michele Doerhoff about forensics, Ed Shouse about rocks and minerals and Philip Schmidt about physics.
“We’re very glad and grateful for the teachers who helped out,” Mertz said.
Mertz said this is the first time the school has had a Science Olympiad team in a long time, and that the kids initiated the formation of the team.
“I thought it was great,” Mertz said. “It’s really exciting to see students getting interested.”
Abby Censky, junior, participated in the Science Olympiad competition over the weekend.
Censky said she decided to be a part of the Science Olympiad team because it is interesting and there are a lot of diverse science events.
Censky competed in three events: forensics, rocks and minerals human anatomy. Censky said she choose each of the events she participated in for different reasons.
“Anatomy class I’m in right now” Censky said. “Forensics is a really interesting one. I just wanted to try [rocks and minerals] out.”
The activities for each event varied, Censky said.
“[What we did was] different for each one,” Censky said. “For forensics, we had qualitative analysis of chemicals and polymer identification and more simple things like bloodtyping and finger printing.”
Censky said for human anatomy they had to take an hour long multiple choice test and identify structures.
The judges of the competition score based on performance in the specific events, Censky said.
“They have judges that look at how well you’ve done,” Censky said. “It could be scoring a multiple-choice test or seeing if you correctly identified chemicals. It’s different for each one.”
Censky said she is interested in pursuing science in college. She wants to be in the pre-med field with a specific major in physical anthropology.