RHS’s own Science Olympiad team competed well at two recent tournaments, the Union College Regional Tournament on Jan. 11 and the Penn State Invitational on Jan. 14. Preparing since early October, the fifteen-member regional team took regionals by storm, placing ninth out of 24 schools. Three days later, and undeterred by the 4:30 a.m. bus departure, the thirty-member invitational team finished 15^th out of 28 teams at Penn State.

Prior to these two tournaments, the last in-person tournament for the Science Olympiad team was in Feb. 2020, a month before the Covid lockdown that temporarily shuttered RHS. Three years later, the team was glad to be back in person to compete, learn from others and experience the independence that comes with navigating a college campus.

“One of the best parts of our club is the comradery,” said Andrew Palmer, the Science Olympiad coach since 2016. “Being together on the bus, being in homeroom, running around on campus; we didn’t get these experiences alone in our basements [during lockdown].”

Members competed in a total of 23 different science and engineering events. These events consisted of either taking an hour-long test or testing engineering projects against other those of competitors. Science events varied from forestry, where competitors needed to prepare a binder of notes to take a test about trees, to code busters, where competitors employed mathematical methods to translate codes into understandable information. For engineering, competitors built everything from rubber-band propelled airplanes to wooden bridges required to withstand 20 pounds of weight.

Palmer explained why attending tournaments was a valuable experience for RHS students with scientific curiosities. “You get to see other teams. We saw other groups, their preparation, their trajectory projects and their chemistry labs,” he said. “We get to see different approaches, which is what science is all about. Being at college campuses with such well-established science departments where across the street there’s an astrophysics observatory; kids start asking questions.”

To earn a medal, competitors needed to place in the top six in their events. Four RHS students at regionals and six at Penn State earned such a distinction. At regionals, Amritha Senthilkumaran and Lindsey Bona placed second in Green Generation, and Sophia Olechowski and Aleksandra Roche finished fourth in Write It-Do It. At Penn State, Katrina Lanese and Jonah Perelman placed fourth in Cell Biology, John Hu and Elizabeth Morgievich placed fifth in Wifi Lab and Leah Ohlssen and Katie Park placed sixth in Scrambler.

The Science Olympiad team looks forward to taking on the competition at their upcoming tournament at Yale on Feb. 4.