PHS Science Olympiad teams see continued success

Carly Newton, The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, N.Y.
·3 min read

May 21—PLATTSBURGH — For some students on Plattsburgh High School and Stafford Middle School's Science Olympiad teams, events like STEM Day originally inspired them to further pursue the science field.

Ella Mansfield, senior captain on the high school Science Olympiad team said she was "pretty sure Fifth Grade STEM Day is when I decided I liked physics."

"Look at me now."

FIRST PLACE

In March, Mansfield, along with senior teammates Archita Jain and Aili Teittinen-Gordon, took home first place in the Science Olympiad state competition in experimental design — one of 23 events that take place in the competition.

The group had to dissolve sugar in water for their state competition.

"Essentially... they give us materials, and sometimes there's a theme, but the rest is up to us," Mansfield said.

"We just have to design an experiment — you have 50 minutes to design it — and get results."

Jain said her interest in the field began when she was younger too.

"I've just been continuing through middle school to high school," she said.

"I've been in various events: physics events, chemistry events, biology events, engineering events. I've just been through a lot of activities, made a lot of binders, and a lot of notes."

OTHER RANKINGS

Stafford Middle School also saw success at state's this year with two students individually placing in the top 10.

"Overall, we placed 31 out of the 40 teams from around the state competing there. Out of the 23 events the students competed in, two were top 10 finishes," Kathleen Howard, coach for Stafford Middle School's Science Olympiad team, said.

"Science Olympiad is run like a track meet. You place as a team overall, but there are individual events that different students on the team compete in to determine the overall score.

Physics teacher and co-coach of the high school Science Olympiad team, Corey Mousseau, said that Mansfield, Tettinen-Gordon and Jain's group was only the fourth first-place winner in the program's history.

Among the other top individual finishes at state's were:

—Bela Meyer and Emma Slattery placing 7th in the Mission Possible event.

—Nate Lambert and Soumar Bachawaty placing 6th in the Storm the Castle event.

—Calla Allen and Meara Fischer placing 16th and 17th in two events: the Sound of Music and the Food Science events.

"The hard part about states is, New York doesn't break our schools up into divisions like with sports — we're just one big group at states, so were going up against the powerhouses, the schools with 5,000 kids in a grade, private schools, home schools — the fact that our schools even make it to states to actually get our names on the leaderboard is really fantastic," Mousseau said.

"Science Olympiad is more than the medals. In our school alone, we have 45 kids that participated, so about 10% of the school is in Science Olympiad. Middle school had higher numbers than usual (too).

"These kids are working extra time, they're coming in after school, they're coming in in the mornings, they're giving up weekends to compete. It's a really cool program. We have some kids go on to do some really awesome stuff in college afterward and get into really good schools."

Email: cnewton@pressrepublican.com

Twitter: CarlySNewton