Science Olympiad serious business for middle schoolers

MOSES LAKE — For eighth-grader Anita Valdez, one of the best parts of building things is watching them fail.

“I like to break them,” she said.

Just a few minutes earlier, Valdez and her partner and fellow eighth-grader Libby Retterer stood in a classroom in the Big Bend Community College STEM building on Saturday and presented their “boomilever” to judge Bobby Lane. Made entirely of balsa wood and held together by glue, the “boomilever” is a cantilever arm designed to hang from a wall and test the ability to design and build load-bearing structures.

“There’s thinner wood at the top for tension and thinner wood at the bottom for compression,” Valdez said. “I couldn’t test this design, so I’m hoping this will pretty much hold up.”

“It looks very nice,” said Lane, an engineer with Apollo Mechanical Contractors, an engineering and construction company based in Kennewick. “Did you draw this first or just put it together?”

“It’s based on a design we had earlier,” Valdez said, laughing. “But quite clearly I did not draw it; the sides are not the same.”

Valdez occasionally and very purposefully pulled a Rubik’s Cube out of her pocket and flipped the sides around.

“How much load?” asked Lane,

“I don’t know, four scoops? I didn’t measure. Four or five kilos?” Retterer asked.

“What’s your estimate?” Lane asks Valdez.

“Eight kilos,” she said.

“I think you’ll get 10,” Lane replied.

Retterer and Valdez, both middle school students at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Kennewick, hung their “boomilever” from a hook and then attached a giant plastic bucket, with Valdez using drumsticks to stabilize the bucket while Retterer slowly poured in sand.

“You have two more minutes,” Lane said after more than four scoops of sand.

And then SNAP! The “boomilever” collapsed under the weight of 5.3 kilograms — a little more than 11 1/2 pounds — of sand.

“That went better than some of the attempts where we were first doing it,” Retterer said. “It’s better than I thought it would be. Better than last year.”

The contest was part of the Science Olympiad held at Big Bend Community College on Saturday, the first time the 35-year-old nationwide science contest’s regional competition was held in Moses Lake. This year’s middle school event brought students from Frontier, Chelan, Ephrata, and St. Joseph’s to Moses Lake to test their knowledge of everything from chemistry and engineering to math and medicine.

Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake, which sent three teams to the competition, placed first, second and fifth, with the first-place team going on to the state competition in April. The two teams from St. Joseph’s placed second and fourth, with the second-place team also earning a slot at the state competition.

The top two teams at state will go on to the national competition in the summer.

“Frontier has trophies going back to 1992,” said Jay Loutherback, a science teacher at Frontier Middle School. “There are 23 events, 15 kids per team, and most kids have three or four events that they participate in and become the masters of.”

“It is the best part of teaching,” Loutherback added, noting that he has been coaching Science Olympiad for all 20 years he has taught at Frontier. “The competitive nature is really motivating for a lot of kids. They work harder ... than they might otherwise; knowledge level goes a lot deeper.”

“It’s a lot of fun, though,” he said.

This is the first year, however, that the competition has been held at BBCC, something both organizers and participants — at least those from Moses Lake — hope will continue.

“Now we get to celebrate and enjoy watching the students shine at all of their events and be proud of their accomplishments,” said Tyler Wallace, one of the event’s co-organizers this year.

But for the students, it’s serious work. In the Aviation Maintenance Technology building, a portion of the floor had been cleared, and a group of Frontier students was testing what were, to the untrained eye, flimsy wire-body airplanes with balsa wood and foam wings they launch with elastic bands.

The goal was to keep the plane light — under 10 grams, or about one-third of an ounce — while keeping it aloft for as long as possible.

While all the gliders appeared to be identical, they clearly weren’t. Several students struggled, while eighth-grader Makoto Miura and seventh-grader Aiden Mann managed to keep their plane gliding in wide, gentle loops for nearly 12 seconds.

They even stopped to help their teammates.

“It’s not particularly difficult. We just tweak it,” Miura said. “Tweaking matters a lot. Planes are relatively similar in higher competition, but it’s the tweaking that makes the difference.”

“We just know how to fly it after a lot of tweaking,” Mann added.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.