Science Olympiad Border Battle (Div. C)

Knowledge based (study/test) events 

Anatomy & Physiology- Teams complete a test on nervous, special senses, and endocrine systems.  

Astronomy- Teams complete a test on Stellar evolution: from formation and destruction. 

Codebusters- Teams cryptanalyze and decode encrypted messages using cryptanalysis  

techniques for historical and modern advanced ciphers.  

Designer Genes- Teams will answer questions, solve problems, and analyze data pertaining to classic, evolutionary, and molecular genetics. 

Disease Detectives- Teams will use their investigative skills in the scientific study of disease, injury, health, and disability in populations or groups of people.  

Dynamic Planet- Teams will complete tasks related to physical and geological oceanography. 

Entomology- Teams will be asked to identify insects and selected immature insects by indicated taxonomy (order, subclass, or family), answer questions about insects, and use or construct a dichotomous key for insects in contiguous United States. 

Forestry- Teams will test knowledge of North American trees and forests along with their uses, management, and conservation. 

Remote Sensing- Climate change, Teams will use remote sensing imagery, data and computational process skills to complete tasks related to climate change processes in the Earth system. 

Rocks & Minerals- Teams will identify and classify rocks and minerals and demonstrate knowledge of how rocks and minerals help to understand geologic processes, interpretation of earth's history, the development of natural resources, and use by society.  

Engineering based build events 

Boomilever- Teams design and build a cantilevered beam or truss structure that extends from a vertical testing wall and supports a load at a specified distance from the testing wall. 

Bungee Drop- Teams will bring a pre-designed elastic cord to conduct drops at a given height(s) and attempt to get a mass placed in a bottle as close as possible to, but without touching, a landing surface. 

Electric Vehicle- Teams design, build, and test one vehicle that uses electrical energy as its sole means of propulsion to travel in a set amount of time and stop close to a target point.  

Helicopter- prior to event, teams will construct, collect data on test flights, analyze and optimize free-flight rubber-powered helicopters to achieve maximum time aloft during tournament.  

Hovercraft- Prior to the competition, teams will design, construct, and calibrate a self-propelled air-levitated vehicle that moves down a track.  

Ping Pong Parachute- Prior to tournament, teams will design, build, and bring up two bottle rockets to the tournament to launch a ping pong ball attached to a parachute to say aloft for the greatest amount of time.  

Robot Tour- Teams design, build, program and test one Robotic Vehicle to navigate a track to reach a target at a set amount of time as accurately and efficiently as possible.  

Hands-on laboratory events  

Chemistry Lab- Teams complete a lab report sheet with questions on chemical reactions/stoichiometry and kinetics. 

Code Craze- Teams will participate in three quiz and coding activities designed to assess their knowledge of practice module material in four areas: programming concepts, AI, cryptography and python. 

Engineering CAD- Teams will read a set of engineering drawings and collaborate to CAD parts in Onshape and then incorporate these parts with provided components to create an assembly.  

Experimental Design- Teams will be assessed on ability to design, conduct and report the findings of an experiment entirely on-site. 

Forensics- Given a scenario and some possible suspects, students will perform a series of tests. These tests, along with other evidence or test results, will be used to solve a crime.  

Material Science- Teams will complete lab activities and answer a series of questions related to the material science of nanomaterials with an emphasis on chemical, physical, optical, and mechanical properties of nanoparticles.  

Multiple task hybrid events  

Circuit Lab- Teams complete a test and activities on electricity and magnetism.  

Horticulture- Teams will be assessed on their knowledge of horticulture. Teams may also grow from seed pea plants and test multiple variables to achieve a maximum score.  

Machines- Teams will construct a lever-based measuring device prior to the tournament to determine the mass ratios between three test masses and complete a written test on simple and compound machine concepts.  

Protein Modeling- Teams will use computer visualization and online resources to construct a physical model of a de novo designed ideal protein structure. This year's event will focus on DI-II_10 as described in doi: 10.1038/nature1.  

Water Quality- Teams will be assessed on their understanding and evaluation of freshwater aquatic environments. Teams must build, calibrate, bring and demonstrate a salinometer/hydrometer capable of measuring saltwater concentrations between 1-10% (mass/volume).  

Campus Food Options

Memorabilia

Science Olympiad Parking Map

Bus Parking:
•    Park in PAY1 (North section- Duck/Eagle/Hawk/Swan/Loon/Owl/Crane/Crow).
•    Park across the spaces (approximately 6 spaces). 
•    Buses can load and unload in this area as well. 
•    Buses can be left unattended. 

Van Parking:
•    Park in PAY1 (Rows Finch/Dove).
•    Park normally in the spaces.

Visitor/Parent Parking:
•    Park in Q lot. 

Volunteer Parking:
•    Park in any non-reserved employee permit spaces with the exception of C lot (Luther Memorial Church lot.)

PAY2 will be enforced so anyone parking in PAY2 must pay using the pay station or MobilePay.

Local accommodations include:

• Radisson Hotel River Falls
• Country Inn River Falls
• Econo Lodge River Falls

We need your help!

Volunteer Opportunities with Science Olympiad Invitational Tournament

Exhibitors sign up here!

Science Olympiad College and STEM Resource Fair Table Registration

Be sure to complete the registration above for your team prior to submitting payment.

New to our payment system? Please create an account to get started.  Then add the event to your cart.  

We use Avogadro for generating Team Rosters and for sign up events. Follow the information here to help you get your accounts set up: https://www.wisconsinso.org/avogadro. Please make sure to share your Avogadro usernames with Jamie Schneider at jamie.schneider@uwrf.edu if it was not shared during your Science Olympiad registration. 

Make sure to enter your team rosters and to let Jamie know who and when students will be competing in online scheduled events. This is critical so not too many teams show up for a given time slot. First come, first serve with time slots. 

Please complete the following forms and return to Angela Whitaker at angela.whitaker@uwrf.

1. Each school MUST submit a field trip form which is the school district approving the trip and continuing to maintain custodial care for youth on campus. We have to submit these to our internal systems prior to the event. All forms in this system have to go in together so please don't delay the entire approval process. 

   2. Each school MUST submit media release forms. One per student (youth) participant. Email the scanned forms as one file (or share a google folder with one file) to Jamie Schneider and Angela Whitaker.

Trophies

Trophies are awarded for Team awards for overall scores 1st-4th place (Varsity teams only if more than one team from a school), lowest five event scores are dropped.

Trophy is awarded for one Overall Spirit Award by school: Voted on by event supervisors and volunteers.

Medals

Medals are awarded for 1st-4th place in each event for Varsity large and small teams. All teams eligible.

Exhibition Medals

Each team will be marked as either "varsity" or "JV" with those teams getting the "exhibition" label in Avogadro. We do this to prevent one school or two schools from sweeping a majority of the medals. This ensures that a different school will earn each different medal in each event, with the exhibition teams able to earn "duplicate" medals in all of the events but they don't earn a team score. For example, consider a random Event A that has Boyceville Varsity finish 1st, Boyceville JV finish 2nd, New Richmond JV finish 3rd, Hudson JV finish 4th, Hudson Varsity finish 5th, Menomonie Varsity finish 6th, and Elk Mound Varsity finish 7th. If there were four medals awarded, the gold medal would be Boyceville Varsity, Silver (exhibition) to Boyceville JV, Silver to Hudson Varsity, Bronze (exhibition) to New Richmond JV, Bronze to Menomonie Varsity, and fourth (exhibition) to Hudson JV, fourth to Elk Mound varsity.