Montana students display STEM skills in annual Science Olympiad competition

Nearly 1,400 middle and high school students competed at the Montana Science Olympiad state tournament on Tuesday, Nov. 26. Hosted at Montana State University in Bozeman, the tournament attracts students from across Montana. It is the country’s first qualifying tournament for the National Science Olympiad, which is held in North Carolina in May 2020.

School teams of up to 15 students compete in events that cover high-level STEM topics, many of them relevant to workforce development, such as meteorology, anatomy, forensics, chemistry and food science. Contests in the Technology and Engineering sector test objects that students have built prior to the tournament, such as a mousetrap-powered vehicle or a Rube Goldberg-style machine.

Corvallis Middle School won the state championship in Division B (middle school) and Hamilton High School won the high school Division C for the second year in a row.

Montana teams practice throughout the fall, much as a sports team would. Science Olympiad events involve rigorous preparation and high-level content that hones students’ skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

For example, middle school students in the Circuit Lab contest are tested on properties of electric charges/fields; characteristics of alternating and direct currents; and concepts and units of current, voltage, resistance, power, and energy. Students must be able to perform simple calculations and constructions of a circuit and its individual components, and perform hands-on tasks with a breadboard, such as calculate the power supplied to a circuit; construct an electromagnet; or determine the value of a mystery resistor in a circuit.

As an example of a high school contest, students in the Protein Modeling event construct a pre-built model of cytidine deaminase, adding functionally relevant features to their model, such as amino acid sidechains, DNA or associated molecules. Students also explore a protein structure simulation using the Jmol/JSmol software program; and complete a written exam covering the principles of chemistry that drive protein folding, the mechanism whereby CRISPR functions as an adaptive immune system in bacteria, and ways in which the Cas9 protein has been engineered to make it more useful as a base-editing tool.

While on campus, students also have the opportunity to tour labs and studios while learning about MSU research. The competitors were welcomed by Jason Carter, MSU’s new vice president of research, economic development and graduate education, who participated in Science Olympiad as a youth in Michigan.

The state Science Olympiad tournament has been hosted for 35 years at Montana State University by the Science Math Resource Center within the Department of Education. For more information, visit http://www.montana.edu/smrc/mtso

Contact: Suzi Taylor, MSU Science Math Resource Center, [email protected], (406) 994-2336