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Science Olympiad regionals combine stress, fun for chance to advance

For 2½ stressful minutes Saturday morning, Logan Krutsch stood motionless, teeth clenched and breaking a sweat in the middle of the College of Lake County gymnasium as his rubber-motor airplane whizzed overhead.

This is the annual Grayslake Regional Science Olympiad. And the pressure is real.

"Just before this competition, all four of our motors broke so we had to go with new, relatively untested motors today," Krutsch said moments after his plane logged a respectable but not as long as expected flight. "It's all stress out there until you see the plane elevate near the ceiling. If it goes high, you know you're going to get a nice long, smooth flight."

The Crystal Lake Central senior plans to study aeronautical engineering this fall at Iowa State University.

"I've always been interested in the properties of the plane and the physics behind keeping it up there. These competitions just pushed me over the edge."

Altogether, about 900 students from 13 high schools and 16 middle schools, mostly from the Northwest suburbs, competed Saturday for spots in the state competition to be held in April at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said Mary Edly-Allen, assistant regional director for ISO.

The competition's 23 events fell into two categories, academic "pen and paper" tests - such as astronomy and fossil identification - and hands-on events, such as wheeled vehicles, robot obstacle courses and launching bottle rockets. About 40 percent of teams qualify for state, she said.

"Science fairs are nice and great but this is the Science Olympiad. This is the real deal," she said. "The events here allow kids to go as far in depth as they like into subjects and experiments that they're interested in, rather then just what they may be studying in school."

Evan Kwan, of Daniel Wright Junior High School in Lincolnshire, was very proud of the robot he guided through the Robo Cross obstacle course.

"We worked hard and our robot is one of the best here," he said. "The control mechanism worked, the gripping mechanism worked. Everything performed great."

The high school teams that advanced to the state competition are Stevenson, Crystal Lake Central, Grayslake Central, Huntley, Cary Grove and Libertyville

The middle school teams that will compete next month at the state level are Daniel Wright, Grayslake Middle School, North Shore Country Day School, Highland, Frederick, Pope John XXIII and St. Gilbert School.

Other high schools that participated were Barrington, Buffalo Grove, Crystal Lake South, Grayslake North, Lake Forest, Prairie Ridge, Rolling Meadows and Warren. The other participating middle schools were Antioch Upper Grade, Beardsley, Bernotas, Hawthorne, Highland, Lake Bluff, Lundahl, Grayslake Park Campus and Woodland Middle School.

  Alex McCumber, left, and Liam Norman, both sixth graders at Frederick School in Grayslake, compete in the Robo Cross during Saturday's Science Olympiad hosted by the College of Lake County in Grayslake. Joe Lewnard/jlewnard@dailyherald.com
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