Student's project brings Science Olympiad to Rice

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by Elizabeth Egle

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The Science Olympiad will consist of a variety of events, including an egg-drop and an aerodynamics event consisting of paper-airplane flying. A "Surfing the Net" event will also be introduced this year.

Noah Rosenberg, a Hanszen College senior, got the idea of hosting the Olympiad while he was participating in the Leadership Rice program last year.

"Through Leadership Rice we had to find a problem and try to fix it," he said. Rosenberg had competed in the Olympiad while he was in high school.

"The Texas chapter does not have as well-developed a network of regional competition" as other states do, he said.

Rosenberg wanted to change this, so he made the Science Olympiad his Leadership Rice "problem."

Although the participants in Leadership Rice are required only to create a theory of how they would fix a problem, Rosenberg said making the Olympiad a reality "was not too insane a jump to go through with."

Sid Richardson College junior Krista Kyle was Rosenberg's unofficial assistant in organizing the Olympiad, which will consist of 16 events.

Students were involved in most aspects of planning: a majority of the events are student-run, and the tests that will be administered were written by students, Kyle said.

Catherine Arthur, a Hanszen sophomore, is the coordinator of the Pentathalon. "I had to go back and think of what I knew in middle school and high school," she said. She said that after four years of chemistry -- two at Rice -- she was a little out of touch with the level of difficulty that younger kids need.

Rice Chemistry Professors and Nobel Laureates Robert Curl and Richard Smalley will be presenting the awards at the end of the competition.

"There will be some problems, but a lot of people have been helping out, so I think it will go very well," Kyle said.

This item appeared in the News section of the January 24, 1997 issue.

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