Virginia Science Olympiad

Wishing everybody a great start to the new school year!

It feels like the last season only just ended, but yesterday the VASO board met for their annual retreat to prepare for the upcoming year. Thank you to Kacey Meaker and Episcopal HS for hosting us!

“We continue to commit to transparency about our thinking and decisions.”

Our bylaws require an annual membership meeting, so check out the recording for a review of the past year and a preview of the next!

2022-23 Virginia Science Olympiad Annual Report The VASO bylaws require an annual meeting of the Board of Directors and the membership to be held before the end of June every year.0:00:00 Board Members0:03...

Listen in for a brief interview with Virginia test writer and National Event Supervisor, Ashwin Ghadiyaram!

It's time for an all-star lineup on this week's episode of The STEM Yard! Join host Alonzo Alexander LIVE from the SONT 2023 at Wichita State University as he chats with Jenny Kopach, Ash Ghadiyaram, and Alan Chalker. What sets Science Olympiad apart from other STEM competitions? How does scoring work? Get the inside scoop and find out!

Tune in to now! go.ncsu.edu/stemyard

Science Olympiad Alumni Network

Congratulations to the Class of 2023! 🥳🎓 We hope you'll take a minute to fill out our alumni volunteer interest form so we can stay in touch! https://forms.gle/QSxbF8UJoGnRu3gW8

Congratulations to all our teams at the SONT 2023 National Tournament!

Our teams showed off their Virginia spirit at the Parade of States during the opening ceremony at the National Tournament! Wish them luck for the competition tomorrow!

From a 5am flight out of National Airport all the way to Wichita State University, we made it to the SONT 2023 National Tournament!

Langley HS is clearly ready for Nationals!

First team check-in.

Last but not least is one of our long-time building event supervisors, Kyle Pyne! Kyle is an alum of the Longfellow MS team, and now he's an aerospace engineer at Aurora Flight Sciences. He often organizes groups of his coworkers to volunteer and is helping us pursue sponsorship opportunities with his company. Lately you might've seen him judging Storm the Castle, which was one of his favorite events as a competitor!

Next in our Division D series is Kira Emmons! She competed for 7 years here in Virginia for White Oaks ES and Lake Braddock SS. Now Kira works as an electrical engineer, and she wears many hats for VASO including event group leader and appeals committee member.

We are excited to announce that Virginia has received a second Division C bid to the National Tournament – congratulations Langley HS!

The state bids were officially released today, so we're excited to announce the VA schools that qualified for the 2023 National Science Olympiad Tournament at Wichita State University! Congratulations to
⭐️ Thomas Jefferson HS for Science & Technology
⭐️ Langley HS
⭐️ Longfellow MS
⭐️ Cooper MS
TJ Science Olympiad SONT 2023

Our next alumni volunteer spotlight is Alvin Meng! During his final year as a competitor at TJHSST, he co-founded a network of VA high schoolers to help Div B students, and they held a whopping 150 mentoring sessions in their first year. Now Alvin is a chemistry and math major at UVA, and you can always catch him ESing at our Charlottesville area tournaments! (+we hear he'll be the UVA SO president next year!)

Next up in our alumni volunteer series is our photographer, Patrick Killoran. He earned his Alaska high school the spirit award at a national tournament for making a video interviewing lots of the other teams. All these years later he's now a parent to a Division A competitor, and he's still showing us those magical Science Olympiad moments through his photography! (Did you spot that he turned his national Bungee Egg Drop gold medal into a nametag?)

Meet Lillian Sun Tadlock! A Science Olympiad alum from Tennessee, Lillian has now raised three Science Olympians of her own in Virginia. She's one of our fabulous volunteer coordinators, and often the first face you see when you walk into our tournaments!

Over the next several weeks we'll be spotlighting some alumni who have returned as volunteers, or Division D as we like to call it 😆 First up is Dan-Tam Nguyen, the Chair of our Board! Originally from Texas, her team made it to Nationals her senior year, and she returned the following years as an assistant coach to help them win two more state titles. Now Dan-Tam is an environmental engineer at the EPA, and you may have spotted her running Environmental Chemistry at our tournaments this year!

The state bids were officially released today, so we're excited to announce the VA schools that qualified for the 2023 National Science Olympiad Tournament at Wichita State University! Congratulations to
⭐️ Thomas Jefferson HS for Science & Technology
⭐️ Langley HS
⭐️ Longfellow MS
⭐️ Cooper MS
TJ Science Olympiad SONT 2023

Check out this great demo and explanation of the Roller Coaster device that won 1st place at our state tournament!

Winning Rollercoaster Science Olympiad (Spring Hill) Division B rollercoaster with the ability to get perfect time from 30-60 seconds.

We hope everyone had a wonderful time at the state tournament yesterday! Thank you to the Science Olympiad at UVA club and the UVA Engineering Student Council for hosting us!

Nominations are now open for the 2023 Coaching Excellence Awards! Coaches are behind the success of so many of our Science Olympiad teams, and we want to recognize them. 🍎This year we will be awarding free registration to 4 coaches for the Virtual Event Bootcamp 💻, and 2 coaches for the Event Build Clinic in Naperville, IL 🛠️. Learn more and nominate your coach by April 17th at https://www.soinc.org/form/2023-coaching-excellence-nominat

Did you know this year in VA 44% of Div B and 50% of Div C SO participants are female or non-binary? We're grateful for the coaches, mentors, and parents who support these scientists in the making!

Having trouble massing your aircraft for Flight? Try cutting a notch in a cup to hold it above the balance!

Have you spotted the cool way our Storm the Castle & Trajectory spotters determine where the ball first bounced? They take slo-mo videos of the launch to find the exact frame where the ball lands, then compare it to the reference grid on the floor. Between 3 people, they can precisely triangulate the correct spot!

Clarifications and scoresheets have been updated on our website for States 👀

Events BC

“Stafford High School senior Justin Kelly used a curious collection of objects to make his science competition entry last weekend: PVC pipe, duct tape, Styrofoam, a No. 2 pencil, half a sock.”

Check out the article the University of Mary Washington published about the regional they hosted this year!

UMW-Hosted Science Olympiad Tests Students' STEM Skills Stafford High School senior Justin Kelly used a curious collection of objects to make his science competition entry last weekend: PVC pipe, duct tape, Styrofoam, a No. 2 pencil, half a sock. Despite its patchwork of parts, the contraption – an egg transporter that represents a lesson in physics .....

Don’t forget to order your shirt before the deadline on Monday @11:59pm!

Some of our favorite regionals moments ❤️

Don't miss your chance to order your 2023 State Tournament Commemorative T-Shirt before the March 6th deadline! https://www.customink.com/fundraising/vaso2023stateshirt?utm_campaign=desktop-campaign-page-share-v3&utm_content=vaso2023stateshirt&utm_medium=social&utm_source=copy-link

We had a wonderful time on the University of Mary Washington campus for our last regional tournament of the year! Thank you to the UMW administration and faculty for hosting us!

The trial events at the 2023 VA State Tournament will be . . . Solar Power and Botany! Please check their event pages on our website for which version of the rules to use.

Students got to reach for the stars during the shows at yesterday’s regional tournament 💫🔭 Thank you to the TJHSST Astronomy Lab Director Kelsey Stuart for coming in on a Saturday just for us!

Another successful regional in the books! Thank you to the TJ Science Olympiad team for hosting such a smooth day!!

This year we'll be releasing our official tournament results through Duosmium! If you've been to invitational tournaments you're probably already familiar with it, but if not just trust us that it's a lot nicer than reading a pdf 😆 We can't say enough thank yous to the whole Duosmium team, especially VASO alum Shreyas, for helping us get over a decade of our archived results uploaded to their platform https://www.duosmium.org/results/

Seniors - want to win a $10,000 college scholarship? 🎉 Apply for the Founders' Scholarship! Five Science Olympiad seniors will be awarded scholarships this year - learn more and apply today! 🎓 https://www.soinc.org/programs/scholarships

We’ve finally finished grading all 2,116 regional written tests 😅 A huge shoutout to Science Olympiad at Virginia Tech and the Orion Living Learning Community at VT for staffing about 70% of our volunteer positions yesterday – that’s roughly 150 combined person hours!

Good luck to everyone participating in Written Test Day today!

The setup vs the shot 📸 Don’t forget to share your written test day photos with us !

Tons of useful Codebusters advice from the National Event Supervisor!

"You want kids who have diverse backgrounds, who have different ways of thinking because there are different ways of solving the problem." - John Toebes

🎙️Listen- http://ow.ly/3hxp50MJeOT

John Toebes, National Codebusters Event Leader, joins us in to discuss his background with Codebusters, tips for forming a well-rounded team, the importance of diversity and tricks for decoding faster. In the second half of the episode, John answers listener-submitted questions that cover a wide variety of event-specific topics, including the fractionated morse cipher, Patristocrat and Cryptarithm.

We’re fortunate that about 5 years ago a couple of our volunteers made us custom sets of photogates 💚 Don’t forget that dowel on the front of your vehicle, or else it won’t break the laser beams to get a time!