Colfax High School Science Olympiad: “Science is awesome!” – CHS Science Olympiad team wins first gold medal, heads to River Falls Jan. 21

By LeAnn R. Ralph

COLFAX  —  Now that the Colfax High School Science Olympiad team has won its first gold medal and will be heading to UW-River Falls January 21 for the Fifth Annual Border Battle, team members are more enthusiastic than ever.

Science Olympiad team members Hunter Larson and Wesley Kallstrom won Colfax High School’s first-ever gold medal in Material Science at the December 3 Boyceville Science Olympiad Invitational.

Michael Hurlburt and Hunter Larson came home with a fourth place medal.

The Colfax High School Science Olympiad team is coached by Mark Mosey, CHS biology teacher.

Team members are Hunter Larson, Lillian Sanders, Wesley Kallstrom, Michael Hurlburt, Aza Knaack, Lilla Bacon, Nathaniel Lee, Pierce Harvey, Eddie Doerr, Trenton Anderson and Michael Lyrek.

Science Olympiad is a team competition in which students respond to various challenges in a variety of scientific disciplines, including earth science, biology, chemistry, physics and engineering. 

Each school participating in Science Olympiad has multiple teams that solve specific problems in specific categories.

The problems are highly technical, and the solutions involve math, physics, biology, and sometimes building a machine or another device to achieve a task.

The Boyceville Invitational limits the number of teams to 60. 

Science Olympiad competitions occur on the regional, state and national level.

Dead bodies

Aza Knaack and Lilla Bacon compete in forensics — the dead body kind and not the language kind. 

From their comments about the forensics challenge, they are both avidly passionate scientific sleuths.

“We determine how long a body has been dead. They give you samples. We determine how they died, when they died, who killed them, where, with what weapon, just with the sample we are given. We determine how to single out their DNA, their fingerprints,” Lilla said.

Aza Knaack says she is the only person she knows who is not repulsed by the smell of dead, decaying body tissue — which in itself would be a distinct advantage in forensics.

“For the longest time I have been interested in dead bodies. I’m not a serial killer, I swear it, but I’ve always wanted to do forensics!” Lilla said.

Wind power

Eddie Doerr will be working on wind power for the River Falls meet. 

“You have to try to make a wind power station out of a CD and pretty much anything you can find to use, and you have to make it spin to generate electricity and it has to be under, I believe, 16 grams in order for it to count,” he said.

“On the CD you would mount the blades. As it spins, it generates electricity, and the more electricity it produces the higher the points (awarded). I did not do this at Boyceville, but I thought it was interesting and wanted to give it a try,” Eddie said. 

Optics and invasive species

Hunter Larson and Eddie Doerr will be working on optics together. 

“We measure out how a beam will react to mirrors and try to get the laser to hit a specific target. You get one to five lasers to use and mirrors to target,” Hunter said.

Hunter Larson and Michael Lyrek will be working on an invasive species challenge.

“You get a picture of an invasive species. We have to name it by common name or scientific, and we have to figure out why it is invasive and where it came from and what does it do to the environment and what we can do to prevent it,” Hunter said.

Material science

Wesley Kallstrom will be competing in Material Science with Hunter Larson.

 “We have to take a test in 55 minutes, and we have to know about the density of an object by how fast it moves,” Wesley said.

 “Last time we had to figure out the viscosity of oil,” Hunter said.

Curiosity 

When asked if they would plan to do Science Olympiad again next year, the group answered with a resounding “yes!”

When asked why Science Olympiad appealed to them, their answers were varied.

“Curiosity.”

“To have fun.”

“To learn.”

“Science is awesome. Most of us are in Science Club and learned about Science Olympiad in Science Club.”

“This is a sport for the non-sporting. It’s not athletic, it’s academic, and that’s more important.”

“It’s fun, and you get to be spontaneous.”

“I thought the subjects would be interesting (like the computer program challenge where team members have 50 minutes or an hour to make a video game based off a topic they are given).”

“And we do it for credentials. You can put it down on a school or job application. It makes you look good!”

Most of the 2016-2017 Colfax High School Science Olympiad team members are in their first year of participating, although several noted that they had participated last year.

STEM

The descriptions of the Science Olympiad challenges really make you wonder where you would ever start, but the students seem undaunted by the prospect of facing those challenges in a competitive event.

Science Olympiad is very “STEMmy,” Mosey said.

He was referring to STEM programming: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

The kinds of challenges presented in Science Olympiad “are really what we need to be doing more of in our science, math and technology classes,” Mosey said.

Taxpayers in the Colfax school district approved a $7.2 million referendum in the November election.

About $1.2 million of the referendum-approved spending will go toward expanding and improving the high school’s technology education and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program.

The tech ed and STEM improvements will include updating computers and computer software.