Student Teams to Participate in
Regional Science Olympiad this Weekend

ORANGE, CA — February 12, 2015 — Student teams from Canyon High School, El Modena High School, Villa Park High School, and Cerro Villa Middle School will represent Orange Unified at the 29th annual Regional Science Olympiad this Saturday.

The event, held at University of California, Irvine, will challenge students with rigorous, standards-based events covering various scientific and engineering topics including human disease, forestry, circuits, thermodynamics, anatomy and physiology.
"Our office views Science Olympiad as a perfect gateway into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers because every field is represented," said Dean Gilbert, Orange County Department of Education Science Coordinator.

Past Olympiad challenges have included hands-on engineering tasks such as an elastic band glider, where students demonstrated flight inside the gym; a gravity vehicle, in which students calculated a way to stop their vehicle on a marked line after launching it down a ramp; a boomilever, a student-built device required to attach to a wall and hold 15 kg of sand without breaking; and an egg drop.

Top scoring teams from the Orange County competition will move onto the Southern California State Science Olympiad in April, to be hosted by Canyon High School for the fifth consecutive year.

According to their website, http://soinc.org/, “Science Olympiad is a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of K-12 science education, increasing male, female and minority interest in science, creating a technologically-literate workforce and providing recognition for outstanding achievement by both students and teachers.”