Weekend Hiatus

I didn't post anything over the weekend - partly because I was busy and partly because I was lazy.

On Saturday, our college hosted the regional Science Olympiad.  Science Olympiad is a series of competitions between high school students where they compete in various events such as astronomy, fossils, forensics, ornithology, chemistry, disease detectives, dynamic Earth, sumo bots, mousetrap vehicle, etc.

In the event I supervised, fossils, there were 20 stations with each station having one or more fossil specimens and several multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank questions about them.  Students were allowed a three-ring binder of material and a field guide.  The hard part about the competition was that teams only had 2 minutes per station which is not enough time to simply look things up.

The overall scores don't really matter, what matters is how the teams rank against each other.  Anyway, it's something our college has hosted for quite a few years now (I've done it for over 10 years myself) and it's nice to see bright, young, high-school students who are enthused about science.  Unfortunately, most of these kids aren't coming to our community college!

One problem I always have with Science Olympiad is that it's on the first Saturday in February and my kids were born on February 5 (I have boy and girl twins hence they have the same birthdate).  So the rest of the weekend was taken up with 10th birthday party events.

Busy weekend.