Rolla High School’s Science Olympiad team competed in their regional competition on March ninth, securing their spot as state qualifiers. They placed fourth overall as a team, securing first through fifth place in 17 total specific events. The subjects tests ranged from forensics to thermodynamics and have taken months to study for.

“Science Olympiad is more of an academic competition. There are two types of events you can have: a tested event where students will go in, usually in pairs, and they will take a test over a specific area,” Science teacher and Science Olympiad coach Keith Peterson said.

A tested event in Science Olympiad might be anatomy and physiology, herpetology, rocks and minerals, or other similar areas.

“Then there are skills or build events. In these, they will build an object like a airplane, helicopter, or bridge. They will see how long it will fly or how much weight it will support. The students will then be judged on how well their object does,” Peterson said.

Preparation begins as early as September to get an idea of how many people they will have. In terms of teams, they fill them out according to who is interested in what.

“The officers basically survey the students to determine who wants to do what events. Each year the events change a little bit, so some years the students want to do a build event without a test. From there, if we have more than two students that want to do an event, then we will do a test and whoever scores highest will get to do the event,” Peterson said.

Co-Presidents and seniors Logan Choi and Carol Koob are praised for their leadership and hard work, making most of the decisions.

“They just run things past me just for teacher approval. But I just let the students presidents and members run the group,” Peterson said.

Choi and his main partner, senior Autym Decker, study for their events and then on competition days, compete against approximately seven other schools. For the past two years, they have placed in the top four at regionals.

“Our goal every year at regionals is to place in the top four because that qualifies us for state. Our current senior’s goal is to go out being three time state qualifiers,” Peterson said.

Their goal was accomplished last weekend, allowing them to advance to state for the third year in a row.