Tips for Preparing for Science Olympiad "Process Events"

If this is your first year attending Science Olympiad competitions, you may be asking yourself what will it be like?  While you won't know the exact format in advance, you can prepare for a few standard formats and have a strategy in place before entering the competition room.

I sort the events into three categories:  building, process, and study.  Building events are those where you have to construct a device, test it, and bring it with you to the competition.  Process events are those where you practice a process, and then do your best to perform the process during the competition.  Study Events are those that require advance study and preparation of notes prior to the competition.  This time I will focus on preparing for "Process Events".

Examples of process events include Write It Do It, Experimental Design, Road Scholar, Metric Mastery, Crime Buster.  These process events are difficult to do alone and involve a team effort.  These events also rely on strong communication skills between team members.  Here are a few tips that apply to the various structures of these process events.

1.  Decide together how the roles will be divided among the partners.   This will require you to know the strengths of each team member and to assign roles to utilize each team members strengths.

2.  Practice sample event tasks in your assigned role.  Each person should go into the event knowing their role.  If only one person knows what the roles are, then time is spent delegating rather than completing the task during the event.

3.  After a competition, talk about the task and how your team performance can be improved.  You may need to work on a different method for communicating during the competition, or how to handle unexpected parts of a task.

4.  While it is not always possible, try to work with the same partners every time you compete in a process event.  This will help you learn how to better work as a team, to be efficient in your efforts, and learn to rely on your partners to do their assigned tasks.

5.  Write It Do It:  One person should be the writer and the other person should be the doer, and practice these roles.  Talk about how to be clear in your directions.  It can also be helpful to switch roles when practicing just to know what it is like to do the other job.  You may not think you can write clear instructions neatly, but with practice you will get better.

6.  Experimental Design:  Know the rubric.  If the event judges will be using the rubric posted on the national site, then make sure you are including all parts of the rubric in your write up of your experiment.  Know the difference between an independent and dependent variable, operationally defined and standards of comparison.   Assign different parts of the write up to each partner, and practice writing out your part.  There is usually not enough time for one person to write everything or to delegate and describe what to write to a team member.

7.  Crime Buster:  Assign roles to each team member.  There will be different components included at each competition, so you have to be prepared for which components are included, and know in advance who will do which parts.  When writing up the summary, include all the data you gathered, then identify which data you are using as evidence to accuse your suspect.  You often get points for discussing data about all the suspects, not just the actual perpetrator.

8.  Metric Mastery:  Know how to use a variety of measuring instrument, and know how to read the instruments resolution and how to correctly record a measurement with the correct degree of accuracy.  Practice using these instruments to make sure you know how to use them and read the measurement.