Students compete in Junior High Science Bowl

The fifth annual District 59 Junior High Science Bowl final was held at the district's Administration Center on Friday, April 4.

The competition was organized at the school level by science teachers Anne Fleming (Friendship), Bill Timmins (Grove), and Katrina Dietrich (Holmes).

Each school held multi-round qualifying competitions that focused on knowledge of the different areas of science (e.g. Astronomy, Biology, Geology, etc.). These elimination rounds eventually lead to naming five students at each school "School Science Bowl Champions."

The 15 school winners were chosen from the approximately 2,100 junior high students who participated in the competition.

The school winners came together for the Science Bowl to compete as a team for the title of District Champions. The teams from Friendship, Grove and Holmes Junior High schools worked together to answer science questions, and complete an activity that simulated a real-life science problem. This year's activity stimulated the writing, and following, a scientific procedure. Writing detailed scientific procedures is a key component of experimental design because it allows for experiments to be duplicated.

To complete the simulation, the teams were split into subgroups. Part of the team was given a model of a "funny snowman," and was asked to write detailed directions on how to build the object. The other part of the team was removed from the room, and upon their return, attempted to duplicate the original "snowman" from the written directions. The teachers used a rubric to judge and score how accurately the replicated object was to the original model.

Congratulations to this year's winner, the Friendship Junior High team.

The students who represented their schools were:

Friendship Junior High: Matt Duffy, grade eight; Tyler Galovich, grade eight; Max Martinez, grade six; Jessica Oros, grade seven; and Austin Sibu, grade eight.

Holmes Junior High: Anup Patel, grade eight; Matthew Anderson, grade eight; Jordan Kiel, grade eight; Thomas Kmiec, grade eight; and Alex Jarosik, grade six.

Grove Jr. High: Ben Jaeger, grade eight; Carissa Lehning, grade eight; Andrew Schau, grade eight; Amanda Sitkowski, grade eight; and Jareth Solis, grade eight.