National Science Olympiad
At an NSTA meeting just over 20 years ago, Jack Cairns from Delaware and Gerard Putz from Michigan decided to develop a national program based upon what Jack had been doing in Delaware for many years and thus was born Science Olympiad.
Science Olympiad was seen as an alternative to the narrowly focused single discipline academic competitions as well as science fair. The founders borrowed from the successful athletic model based upon teamwork, practice, competition and recognition. Those founders, who remain the present leaders, could not have envisioned that in 20 years their program would involve 2.5 million students each year.Their goals were simple, to generate an interest in science among K-12 students and improve knowledge of science. To the extent possible, they wanted to utilize an inquiry approach as opposed to the traditional text book approach. Those inquiry based methods have since been adopted in the new National Science Standards.
The 23 events that comprise the competition are developed each year through the network of national event supervisors and state directors. It is each state's responsibility to register teams and conduct competitions in order to determine which teams will represent that state at the National Tournament. Recent and future National Tournament sites are:
We have a selection of video highlights from a range events featured at the 1996 National Science Olympiad held at Georgia Tech.
For more information see the National Science Olympiad web site. There you will find the latest rule changes as well as links to many other states' web sites.