Crystal Lake Central Science Olympiad Teams’ Rockin’ Robots and Atom-Smashing Success
I’ll be honest. I never was much of a science girl.
So when I heard about the accomplishments of the Crystal Lake Central High School Science Olympiad teams, I felt a little like an “Are you Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” contestant who went home early.
My friend Susan told me her son—one of the Science… Olympians?… created a functioning robotic arm from Erector set left-overs and stuff he bought at Home Depot.
For me, a mechanical accomplishment is fixing the rubber thing inside the toilet tank to make it flush right. Building Mr. Roboto over Christmas break was a little hard to get my mind around.
But I do understand what it’s like to set goals and work your tail off to achieve them. That’s what the twenty-four members of Central’s JV and Varsity Science Olympiad teams did.
Beginning in the fall, the students met on Friday mornings before school and worked independently to build robots, play “disease detective,” solve tricky problems in chemistry, anatomy, a variety of environmental science fields and even master something called “Fermi questions.” Not sure what those are, but I’ve got a hunch they concern atom smashing and some machine under the Swiss Alps that could blow us all to Jupiter.
Probably not a category for Jeff Foxworthy, his professional grade-schoolers, or celebrity guests to tackle.
On March 10, the students competed against sixteen other schools in the regional Illinois Science Olympiad at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, which included academic powerhouses Adlai Stevenson High School from Lincolnshire, Winnetka’s New Trier High School, and the University of Chicago Laboratory School. Local schools represented included Crystal Lake South High School, Huntley High School, and Cary-Grove High School.
When the robot racing, disease detecting and atom smashing were over, the kids from Central took second place. There were bigger teams from bigger schools with bigger budgets, but Central showed what hard work and Home Depot parts can do in the right hands.
They’ll get to strut their stuff again on April 14, at the state competition, which will be held at the University of Illinois in Champaign. The field will be larger, the competition stiffer, and who knows…the atoms might even be harder.
But whatever the outcome, the CLC Science Olympiad teams have done us proud.
Smash on.
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