The Milpitas Science Olympiad held their tri-annual Milpitas Elementary Science Olympiad (MESO) competition on Saturday May 24. Twenty-three teams competed, according to the website Duosmium of the results of the competition released for students and parents to see.
These teams compete against one another in different science-related events through taking a paper test or completing an experiment, MESO director sophomore Aileen Nguyen said.
“Codebusters is where a group of three kids try and decipher ciphers, and they try and do as many as I can within the time span, which I believe is 40 minutes,” Nguyen said. “There’s also insect investigation, which at this competition, it’s run as a station event, so the kids would go from station to station, trying to answer all the questions under that, which would be like, what bug is this? What family does it go under? Where does it live, and stuff like that.”
One of the experimental events was Pasta Bridge, public relations officer Sagarika Jere said.
“This event is a way for folks to test their engineering (and) creativity skills,” Jere said. “They just basically have to build a bridge out of spaghetti noodles and clay, and test it. There’s two ways – basically test how much it can hold through suspension or placing the weight on top until the tower breaks.”
MESO is meant for schools in MUSD, but there are private and public schools from San Jose that may register, Nguyen said. For example, Noble Elementary from San Jose has been sending three teams every year to MESO, Nguyen added.
“Sometimes, when we send out the registration link, parents will make their own team of 15, and that can include students from private schools as well,” Nguyen said. “The private schools that are here are Stratford, Challenger, Northwood – I’m not sure if that’s a private school or if that’s in San Jose – Hopkins and we also have Montessori School of Fremont.”
Debra Anderson is a parent and the volunteer head coach of the three Noble Elementary teams, she said. Anderson had heard about MESO from Letta Meyer, the Milpitas Science Olympiad coach, Anderson added.
“I have three priorities – and I say this over and over – and the first is that they (the students) have fun, and the next one is that they make a friend, and the next one is they learn something on science,” Anderson said. “It’s very social, it’s very collaborative. I have great parents from Noble Elementary, and they’re the coaches of the kids. We also use coaches from Piedmont Hills High School. They’ll come and coach for us too. So my favorite thing is that people are happy and involved in learning science. I just love it.”
The Science Olympiad team hosts three MESO events for elementary schoolers every school year, Nguyen said. The fall and winter events are workshops where the high school team teaches students how to do experiments, while the spring event is a competition, so the spring competition isn’t as costly, she added.
“We’re not spending a lot of money on materials. The only one I could think of is Crimebusters, where we have to spend money to buy the powders needed to test during that test,” Nguyen said. “But this competition to run is definitely less costly than the other workshops we have earlier in the year, such as fall and winter.”
Nguyen thought that there weren’t many problems with this specific MESO competition, she said.
“I would definitely make sure the rules are clear to everyone who’s running the event, so the trial event doesn’t happen again this year,” Nguyen said. “During the trial event, the participants are split into two rooms because we have too many kids, and so how the competition was run within the two different two rooms was different, so it would be unfair to score the overall top five between both teams. So instead, it was top two of each room.”
Anderson is extremely grateful to the Milpitas Science Olympiad team for hosting MESO tournaments, she said.
“I know it’s the end of the year and you just had AP tests, and you’re stressed out with a lot of other things in finals, and we’re so grateful to the students in Milpitas High School that provide this great opportunity,” Anderson said. “These kids are getting a great opportunity in science; we’ll make them excited for science in the future. So thank you so much.”