Students from St. Timothy’s School and the Cochrane Learning Centre won gold for their scientific prowess earlier this month.
The team, comprised of Grade 11 student Eve Hebert and Grade 12 students Erin O’Leary, Duncan Swedlo, AJ Corcoran, and Noah Wttewall-Arteaga, competed at the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta’s (APEGA) Science Olympics at the University of Calgary on April 9.
This is the first team from St. Timothy’s that was allowed to compete in the event due to a competitive application process that only allows 25 teams per division. The team spent the day at the Olympic Oval participating in three events.
“We’re all avid students – Noah and Duncan like to build things and take them apart, AJ really likes computers, Erin is into forensics. So it just appealed to us because it seemed like it would be fun,” Hebert explained.
According to Louise Schumann, the teacher coach of the team, the competitions are based on the Alberta high school science curriculum.
“Just by doing well in school, that’s how they prepared,” Schumann said.
For the first event, the team knew in advance the parameters of the competition – they were required to build a wind-powered device that could carry a brick and bring it to the competition.
“We made a sail with two fans that blew it … We put quite a bit of effort into building ours,” Hebert said.
“It was pretty basic but it did really well though, it travelled 92 feet,” O’Leary added.
For the next event, the team had to solve a murder mystery using forensic science.
“It was a lot of group work,” O’Leary said.
“Especially for the murder mystery event because you had to work together with different people and co-ordinate your information,” Hebert added.
In the final event, they had to “program certain commands for a Super Mario level” said O’Leary. The team wishes they had spent more time looking into the Raspberry Pi system needed for that challenge but still they think did well.
“We knew that the event involved the Raspberry Pi program, we just didn’t know what we’d be doing with it,” Hebert commented.
The scores for each event were then combined and averaged to give the team a final overall score. They were judged on things such as teamwork, functionality, thought-process, and more.
“It was a really weird point system,” O’Leary explained.
“So basically if you scored between 90 and 100 points, you got a gold medal,” Hebert continued.
While the competition was daunting, the team did their best and remembered to keep it in perspective.
“I don’t think we were that intimidated because I think we were more invested in the fun than in the competition,” Swedlo explained.
The team appreciated the opportunity to network with other students at the event. A number of universities also attended that day to provide information about their programs and to give out some free swag.
“It was a lot of fun, you don’t get exposed to a lot of things. You don’t get to use the Raspberry Pi program every day, and you don’t get to do many forensic experiments like testing out fingerprints, and you don’t get to spend the day making a brick-carrying sail,” O’Leary said.
Chris Nowicki, a Grade 8 student from St. Timothy’s, also received a silver medal in the Calgary Youth Science Fair competition, hosted by APEGA, for his investigation about what shapes bees prefer.
