User:Aherthabey

aherthabey is a graduate of the Science Olympiad team at Wayzata High School in Plymouth, Minnesota. He is now studying chemistry at UC Berkeley in northern California, where he continues to help out with Science Olympiad invitationals and tournaments.

aherthabey joined his school's Science Olympiad team as a sophomore. He doesn't actually remember why he joined in the first place (probably at the insistence of his friends), but he definitely remembers being overwhelmed by the number of events available. As a junior, he co-led Green Generation. The people in his event will remember his really sleepy presentations given on his iPad in the corner of the cafeteria. He apologizes for that, but in his defense, Tuesday afternoons were not good times for him to be talking about environmental remediation. In his senior year, he was chosen as a captain, and also led GeoLogic Mapping. His most significant contribution to the team was his overhaul of the team website, as well as some organizational changes.

He hopes that Wayzata can someday qualify for Nationals (aka The Dream). He would also like to see Wayzata Science Olympians establish Division B teams at each of Wayzata's three feeder schools: Central, West, and East (although that would mean competing with the already well-established Math League and Science Bowl teams).

=Events=

Below is a list of events with which aherthabey has the most experience with:


 * GeoLogic Mapping (Favorite event!)
 * Green Generation
 * Hydrogeology
 * Dynamic Planet/Glaciers
 * Anatomy and Physiology (Integumentary, Cardiovascular, Immune)

=Competition History=

Events

 * Water Quality
 * GeoLogic Mapping
 * Dynamic Planet/Glaciers Glossary note sheets
 * Designer Genes He really wanted to do this at one point, but was never placed in it :(

Events

 * Green Generation
 * GeoLogic Mapping
 * Anatomy and Physiology (Integumentary, Cardiovascular, Immune) He did immune and some cardio, and no integumentary because he's a scrub.


 * Bridge Building (didn't do any building)

Events

 * GeoLogic Mapping
 * Green Generation
 * Hydrogeology


 * Disease Detectives
 * Robot Arm (rip FlailBot 2k16)
 * Wright Stuff (User:Blai35 actually built the plane)
 * Air Trajectory
 * Electric Vehicle

Medals
He wore a cow costume to help win the spirit award at the UW-RF Border Battle Invitational.

=Selected Musings on Science Olympiad=

Is Science Olympiad Worth It?
One of the most worthwhile threads I've seen on SciOly.org is the one titled "Is Science Olympiad Worth It?" The following consist of responses to that question.

This one was posted by gh on March 23, 2010.

Everyone else seems to have covered the team aspect of SO, but my experience was quite different. I wasn't on super competitive teams, I've never been to nats, and I never had a coach for my events.

What I got out of SO was experience, the experience, and experiences. When I first joined scioly.org, which is not long after I started doing SO, I was of course very young. :) I joined so I could find out more about Wright Stuff. I posted dumb posts, I didn't always read or search before posting, and I even spammed. It took a long time for me to really get straightened out, but now I'm admin (yo wtf? BTW, I bet DS regrets it). But the point is, spending time with my two terrific teams and a community like this actually helped me grow up.

I also learned a good 80% of what I know about building things, everything about electronics, and a lot about computers from SO work. For example, just on this forum there was a little incident where I tried to imitate relpats-eht's avatar. It taught me a bunch about image compression, making animated GIFs, and image palettes. Now I'm working in and studying computer graphics; I might even make it my living.

It wasn't just technical stuff I learned. One of the more useful skills I learned was how to learn. More specifically, how to learn when you're not in school and you have no teacher. I never had a coach that knew my events better than I did, and in high school, I didn't have a coach at all; it was a wholly student-run team (another story :). Everything SO I learned I had to learn on my own from this site, books, and anything else I could get my hands on. This left me the question of summers.

I loved SO. But there were no rules out in the summer. One might think, naïvely, that he should spend the summer building to the previous season's rules. No. First off, it's important to take a vacation. Get some downtime, even if it's less appealing than SO because of your burning lust for winning next year (which you should definitely have).

Then, my project for the summer would have nothing to do with SO at all, and would be as difficult and time-consuming (and more!) than the summer or my experience could possibly afford. My three summer projects in high school were, in reverse order: (1) Put a vision-based guidance system for my robotics helicopter (2) Build a quadrotor helicopter while hacking OS X to run on PCs (3) Build a quadriped robot.

I almost never got the projects done by the time school started; we NYC kids got stuck with the same school schedule as upstate NY kids, minus the not insignificant snow days, having had perhaps two of those in my ten years of service under the NYCDOE. So we had very short summer vacations.

Still, whatever it was I did in the summer, I was guaranteed that I could successfully use it in the next season. If you spent the summer building a better battery-and-motor cart with wheels, you might learn how to make your next cart go straighter and truer. You spend the summer building a robotic helicopter, or even trying to build a robotic helicopter, and you'll learn how to design your next cart in 3D parametric CAD, precision machine it from impact-resistant PETG, and code a proportional control loop for its C-programmed microcontroller so you can hit arbitrary run times, distances, and targets just by punching in numbers. And do it cheaply too; my parents are not wealthy and didn't really like me spending money on robots. :)

When you have off time, don't waste it on work; do something you absolutely never thought of doing, but that you might like. Sing, play Ultimate with your team, try to increase the definition of your abs. At some point, I was figuring out how to keep as accurate time as possible. It netted me a neat watch and knowledge I was proud of. Then it got turned into an event. bah got me to start playing with fountain pens. My first fountain pen ever will be in my hand in a few days.

And finally to cap this post, which has winded far too verbose already, I learned quality from SO. You know the real difference between a family-owned German company and a Chinese manufacturing mega-corporation? The German company tries to create a quality product and lets it attract the money. The Chinese corporation looks to the bottom line first—quality comes second (or even later than that). Quality needs to come first in SO, and the medals will follow naturally.

I built with more quality than was needed in the first place. My description of the aforementioned "cart" was of my 2009 EV. It was pretty overkill, to be honest, considering I didn't expect my team to make it beyond NY states (it didn't). However, it worked out pretty well. I beat FM with a gold medal and they got second in EV at Nats, so it was like I got second at Nats (I didn't).

Sometimes it doesn't work out. My WS planes in 2007 used rolled tubes and were biplane designs. I was really ambitious and didn't completely know what I was doing. Yet somehow, all the tubes I rolled that year had zero curvature. That is just f'ing magical, if you understand what I'm talking about. They really didn't end up flying all that well, though that may be because I was spending less time on WS that year than before, but they were butterfly impressive. I was proud of my planes even if they didn't net me the medal which I wasn't aiming for in the first place. Heck, my states plane from that year is still the example photo on the Wright Stuff Wiki.

I won either way, because quality was on my side, because I knew I grew up on it all, and because I knew more than the suckers who didn't do SO. So if you're a senior this year, don't feel like you have to win and cap your career with a bang. Go to competition with open eyes and make some memories while you reminisce on the good times past. All my teammates know as well as I do I got that gold medal caring zero about it (mostly because of getting rejected from MIT days before, but also for all the reasons I mentioned above). Don't forget to wipe your tears when you take your bus home—or plane, car, train, boat...

Here is another response, by gyourkoshaven on Jun 02, 2010.

Yes. 1,000,000% Yes.

I entered middle school timid and afraid. I was pretty smart, but that was pretty much it. I wasn't athletic or artistic or gifted in some other way. And for the first 2 months of school, all cared about was fitting in (Which I wasn't doing a great job of).

Mostly due to the convincing of Eyeball138, I showed up at our team's first meeting that 6th grade year. I interrupted a lot, asking a bevy of never-ending questions, and felt totally confused. After that meeting, I decided I would focus on 3 events, Science CrimeBusters, Food Science, and Mystery Architecture. My first day of CrimeBusters, I didn't know what solubility or alkalinity was so I was largely doing nothing productive. Then, not knowing any lab procedures, I put a jar of this clear liquid called a-moan-yah right up to my nose. I screamed and lost my sense of smell for about 15 minutes. I almost quit after that. However I did come back the rest of the week for the meetings for the other two events.

However, by mid-December I had failed miserably in all of my events, and decided I was going nowhere good. I decided that I would quit. After sitting at home really bored and miserable for a month, I decided I would give it one more shot. Best decision of my life.

We were a month away from the competition, however we didn't yet have a trajectory. They put me right on it. And even though I had no physics knowledge, I was determined to get this done. And over that one month, spent 2 hours every day making that trajectory. It taught me determination and patience. However, over that month I also became a lot happier. I was having a blast at Science Olympiad. And I really began to develop a personality, and became more energetic. And by the end of February, I had completed that trajectory, and I had also become one of the most popular kids in my grade.

And although the trajectory got 15th, and they had Haven Chuck build a new one that got 4th at states, I took a gazillion dollars worth of information and life lessons out of that trajectory. In the following 2 years, Science Olympiad has taught me 3 very important lessons:

1. Life isn't always fair: I did Environmental Chemistry in 7th grade. My partner and I were truly a horrendous match. He was an 8th grader, so I figured that he would be more valuable to the event. However he had to focus all of his energy towards our annually horrendous (Until this year) Wright Stuff. So as a 7th grader, knowing nothing about chemistry, I had to exert a TON of energy into getting all of the testing equipment and soil samples that we needed. And truthfully, we sucked at it. (I will come back to this later)

In 8th grade (This very year), our team decided to register for the Solon Invitational. We were really excited for months, and were getting prepared. Then in mid-January (The invitational is the Saturday before the Super Bowl), my grandmother fell ill, and I was not able to go to Science Olympiad for nearly 2 weeks. However, due to my extended absence, I was unable to be placed on the competing team. Then, someone on our team pulled out from going. So the day before the competition, I was put back on the competing team. So I came to school the next day, rejuvenated and inspired in the miracles of life. Then all of the sudden, we are informed that the school district has decided to not let us go, due to an anticipated snow storm. That sucked.

2. Persistence pays off: After we got 4th at States in 7th grade (2009), and only passing two freshmen to the high school, Haven Chuck, myself, and others began a gut-wrenching campaign to get our team to make nationals. We (He) convinced everyone to start working their butts off over the summer. And as the year dragged on, and setbacks like that listed in the paragraph above occured, we began to slack off. However we won our regionals, and kept telling everyone to keep working their hardest, and good things would happen. Then, we went into states, feeling great.

3. You've gotta believe: The day was a disaster. Our plane which had consistently been getting 2+ minutes flew for 10 seconds. Our bridge broke after 2 cups of sand. Can't Judge a Powder was a disaster. My partner had to leave me halfway through Compute This. And as the list of misfortunes piled up, it honestly became challenging to focus on the task at hand in the afternoon events. I called my mom, sulken and upset. We weren't making nationals, the year of hard work was for nothing.

Our last event was Pentathlon. 2 of us (I was one of them) had mightily struggled with both our academic and physical challenges. Then our group physical challenge was to dunk sponges in water, then pass them to our partner who would ring them out in a graduated cylinder. You finished when the cylinders were full. We were almost done, when denmarksoccer slipped. He tapped the graduated cylinder on the side, and it bent at an angle, and you knew that the cylinder was going to fall over. Then, all of the sudden, it straightened itself out. We would've had at least an extra minute on top of our time, had it fallen.

Then we went into the awards ceremony. It turned out that we had WON Can't Judge a Powder and Compute This, and did pretty well as far as the medal count went. However we were still sure we had gotten 3rd as a team. And as the announcer read each team in reverse order, the tension mounted (I even breathed a sigh of relief after 10th place :lol: ). Then after 4th place was announced, it seemed that he took a pause that was a century long (More like 10-12 seconds). 3rd Place wasn't us. We had made nats. I cried on several occasions over the next couple of days, just out of true astonishment that we had done it. That's when I learned that it's truly not over until the fat lady sings. That you've gotta believe.

On top of that, I ended up winning [meteorology] at Nationals. So in less than 3 years, I was transformed from a timid, shy 6th grader, into a confident, narcissistic, and excessively sarcastic 8th grader.

So it's taught me not to complain about some stupid question on a math test, that a teacher put on despite the fact that we've never seen the material. It's taught me that complaining doesn't get you anywhere. Working hard does. It's taught me that you need to be the change you want to see.

Also, I mentioned that I learned discipline and patience from Science Olympiad, along with my lack of athleticism. However, over the last year, I've used the discipline to do things like tone my abs (Thanks gh! :P ), and practice basketball for hours on end. I've gotten good enough that our basketball coach next year wants me to play (Instead of SO). So science olympiad has taught me a lot.

And to conclude this terribly organized essay-type thing, I need to touch on the most important aspect of the last 3 years of my life. The bonds I have created with my teammates will never be forgotten. I've truly come to think of them as brothers, and I've talked to at least one of them almost every day for the past year. I also discovered in the last week and a half that having fun is truly more important than winning. I can have so much fun with my teammates, that we actually ENJOYED the 15 hour bus ride home from Nationals.

And in all honesty, I may not remember 30 years from now that I got 2nd in Experimental Design at regionals this year. However I'm certain I'll remember doing a good luck ritual with eyeball before a DP test, and jamming to 50Cent with denmarksoccer, and having Haven Chuck throw a [golf ball] at me, and mocking pretty much every single thing about LoveRespectPeace's life.

Science Olympiad has been my life for the last 3 years, and I'm incredibly glad that I haven't had to experience middle school without it.

And finally, one by Entomology on Apr 16, 2016.

God, this is an old thread, but it was exactly what I needed. Science Olympiad is so, so worth it. It is worth every bitter moment and every sour experience. I spend more time studying than sleeping, I have superglue on my hands permanently, I break down every other day, but I wouldn't trade scioly for the world.

I know disappointment well. My school has gotten 2nd at state for over seven years, always barely missing the cutoff for nationals, one year by only 2 points. I haven't made my schools A team or the state team ever until this year. I've been half a point away from a gold medal. This year, everything finally seemed to start off okay. The powerhouse school was weakened by a large margin- and our team was the strongest it has been in a long time. Everyone was fueled by euphoria and teamwork; we had won 1st place at a competitive invitational containing multiple powerhouse schools that consistently placed at nationals. We thought this year would finally be the year--but we were so wrong. A vehicle malfunctioned, a trajectory device missed its mark after hitting it 50 times in a row during practice. A station was skipped, a mission possible violated the rules. We had worked so hard-- and everything just fell apart at the last moment. We broke our 2nd place streak, but instead of getting first, we got 4th. Everyone was devastated. Crushed. Our short lived success had come to such an abrupt stop. What happened now? Do we just go back to being strangers?

And this is what made all the black holes, all the bitter experiences worth it. It wasn't just about the placings for me--granted, that was a large aspect-- but it really was the team factor that made it so enjoyable. At the beginning of the year, my scioly state team consisted of one friend, and the other 13 people were complete strangers. Fast forward 6 short months, and I can't imagine what I would do without any of them. And I know it sounds cliche, but my team really was my family. We brought each other up when we were down, and we cried on each other's shoulders. We supported each other. I got to meet so many new people and learn so many new science topics that I would have never been exposed to if it were not for scioly. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You obtain people skills and learn how to work with others. You bond with people and you gain confidence. You learn to accept that things don't always go your way, and you learn to keep going, to keep working. You learn how to study effectively. Scioly gave me so many valuable life lessons, competition days, good memories with good people, among other things that I will never be able to put into words. You bond with people and you get to study and focus on your passions- and to me, that is one of the most valuable things a person can have. My only regret is that I did not realize this earlier and savor the moments I had with my team members and friends while they lasted.

And I won't lie- the medals are nice. But in 20 years, I probably won't remember winning a first in fossils at state. I do know for sure that I will remember running around with my teammates beforehand, laughing as we tried to push each other into the lily pond. I know for sure that I will remember my partner enveloping herself in a furry blanket to receive her medal, and the face the event coordinator made when he saw her looking like a human burrito. It's not winning medals that makes scioly worth it-it's the journey working for that medal, and all the memories and things you learn along the way that count.

And since I'm already jumping all over the place, I thought about it some more and also realized why I wanted to make nationals. It wasn't just for the sake of winning medals and performing well. I just wanted to stay with my team for longer, make more memories, take more tests, have more fun. Success is sweet, but the people around me were sweeter and they mean more to me than any medal or trophy ever will.

Were we happy about not making nationals? Of course not. Embarrassed? Plenty. I moped around for days after state- were all those all nighters and 8 hour study sessions for nothing? But after one of my team members came up and talked to me, I realized that you can’t just remember the broken bitterness of that singular sour experience-- that bitterness will dilute and eat away at all the sweet things and all the good memories you gained from walking that journey, and eventually, you will be left with nothing but a empty stomach and a hollow feeling. Don’t let one bad irregularity ruin the whole picture for you-- that’s not the right mindset and it won't help you at all.

So focus on all the good things, all the good memories and fun times. When your medals tarnish and your trophies rust, in the end, it's all you've got.

Practice Makes Perfect
This has been repeatedly emphasized by Science Olympians past and present, but I feel the need to reiterate it here: the best way to get better at Science Olympiad is to work hard at it. Even if you get straight A's in all your science classes, the skillsets needed for Science Olympiad are so diverse and specific that it is proverbially true—practice makes perfect. This is especially pertinent for events like Dynamic Planet and Fossils, because Wayzata High School has no earth science courses except Astronomy. This also applies to events such as Write It/Do It and Experimental Design, in which the process is more important than the subjects tested. Honestly, I could keep going: building events are 90% trial and error and 10% design, etc. My point still stands: the more you study, build, and practice, the better and more satisfied you will be with your results.

Because practice is a fundamental part of Science Olympiad, I believe that teams that are able to replicate their success have found a way to motivate themselves to work hard and smart. It is very unlikely that all fifteen members will be as zealous as that poor soul that has made Science Olympiad their life, so it is the job of both coaches and captains to make sure that all team members are on task and working hard towards success. The scoring system that Science Olympiad implements demands that all events be strong, lest one event bring down the entire team's score. This is both reassuring and terrifying for the same reason: everyone's score (and therefore effort) matters.

Here are some relevant words from windu34:

My team (Boca Raton Community High School, 1st in Florida for the last 6-7 years) has only one coach. All events are solely prepared for by students only. We do not have event coaches, but rather very motivated students. We work on events every day after school for at least 3 hours in our coaches classroom and that number increases as competition approaches. Team placement is determined both by effort/hard work as well as placement at invites/regionals/states.

An hour a day is NOT enough effort. As a builder on my team which regularly attends nationals, it takes at least 3 hours a day and when 1 month to [competition] approaches, [I'd] up that to 5-6 hours. Builds require a lot of time to be done well because it is such a learning experience. My team has ZERO parent/coach helpers. EVERYTHING is done by students. For example, my team's [Robot Arm,] built by my partner and I, had ZERO help from any parents. We have won 1st at [the MIT Invitational], [Cypress Falls Invitational], Florida Regionals, and Florida States (we'll see about nationals). Our coach's policy is to let the students do EVERYTHING and it is one of the reasons we succeed. When we run into high level programing/mechanical/electrical problems, we have no one to ask, we do the research and hit the forums and try to narrow down where we went wrong.

The best way to eliminate chances of things going wrong is to test it. Of course you [won't] be able to completely eliminate all [chance of error], but you can increase [the chances of success] in your favor. For example, the more you test a [Mission Possible build], the more likely a ball may happen to miss a switch... and [the more] you will be able to correct for it.

Some more insight from WikiMod Unome:

Motivation is the most important thing, more than almost anything else (except possibly good planning and making efficient use of time). Other than that, starting early, planning well, and doing a lot of events is the best you can do individually for your team; however, it's better if you can get a few other people to commit to this as well (post-8th grade me and two other team members sat down and basically split up the new/weaker events in order to make them stronger so we could get the team to Nationals; that's how I joined Fossils and Meteorology).

Stacking Teams
I found a good post on the SciOly.org forums regarding the stacking of teams, specifically at invitationals. Here we define 'stacking' to be the intentional placement of stronger team members on the same team. It is to your team's advantage to stack at regionals, states, and nationals.

There are a lot of opinions out there about stacking. Personally, I think that teams shouldn't stack at invitationals (unless there are space limitations), for several reasons:
 * 1) Stacking, especially early in the season, favors experience. Even if a team member is extremely dedicated and has studied/built/tested all summer, he/she is still less prepared than a jaded senior that doesn't try as hard, simply because of the difference between practice and actual competition.
 * 2) "It can be easier to rank people by ability, which [can] then [be] used to form stacked teams" —Adi1008 on Jan 09, 2016. It forces team members to be accountable for their own learning. Weaknesses are easily spotted, because it is harder to hide behind the the strength of another team member.
 * 3) Stacking alienates team members on lower teams (i.e. those not the top team). Team members on lower teams may sometimes feel marginalized and unable to break the glass ceiling into A team.
 * 4) "It allows people to experiment with new partners and events that normally wouldn't be able to do. For instance, at [the Cy-Falls Invitational], I got do do Wind Power since I was on the different unstacked team as the other two good people. If we (SLHS) had a stacked team at Cy-Falls, I wouldn't have been able to do it (since the other two people are quite a bit better than me), so having unstacked teams allowed me to do an event just for fun that I could possibly do in the future" —Adi1008 on Jan 09, 2016.

But like I said, if there are space limitations, stacking is justified. An example of this is if the tournament restricts schools to a certain number of teams—the UW-RF Border Battle Invitational only allows a maximum of three teams per school. An alternative situation could occur if the tournament is so far away that the transportation cost of bringing more than 1-2 teams is not worth it, necessitating stacking in order to have only the strongest team members compete.

Over-Competitiveness
Below is an excerpt from a post by Alan Chalker [chalker], one of the main supervisors of Ohio Science Olympiad, regarding taking pictures of other teams' builds:

Keep in mind that tournament directors classify events into 2 possible categories: open to the public and closed to the public. There is usually a lot of consistency from tournament to tournament as to which are open to the public, but no specific requirement / mandate in the rules. By making an event open to the public, it's an opportunity to engage parents, siblings, and other team members in this wonderful thing we call Science Olympiad. And as such, in today's modern social media crazed society, we should ENCOURAGE publicity, since anyone can be an author / journalist. Which means we should be supportive of picture and video taking.

The visible, physical appearance of a device (be it a bridge, electric vehicle, or air trajectory device), is usually only a minor contributor to the success of that device. There are so many other factors that weigh far more heavily into the capability (such as glue type, wood density, grain orientation, water content, etc. etc.). There is always room for improvement in any device, and for all those teams thinking they have the ultimate, perfect device they don't want anyone else to 'copy', they might pick up a few tips by observing some of their competitors devices.

Preventing pictures isn't going to stop people from copying devices. Many people have excellent visual memories and can use pencil and paper to draw very accurate sketches of things they've seen. Cameras are becoming smaller and more inconspicuous, allowing photos to be taken very discretely. Broken bridges can be recovered from trash cans after an event and pieced back together. Hence, why start an arms race between the spectators and event supervisors?

The bottom line is something I regular mention at coaches clinics - please keep the SO mission in mind, which consists of 3 components: Create an interest and passion for science; Improve STEM education and workforce skills; Recognize and celebrate achievements by students and teachers. The medals and trophies are the last, third part of the mission, and the part that has the least long-term impact. The first 2 parts are the really important ones, and by trying to be all secretive about device designs at events that are open to the public, a disservice is being done to the mission.

Cool Team Websites
This was back when all I did instead of studying was work on my school's website.
 * Milpitas (Milpitas, CA)
 * This site used to be full of dank memes. I r8 8/8, m8.
 * Syosset (Syosset, NY)
 * This site has a clever tagline (A proud sponsor of underage thinking) and cutesy blogs.
 * Clements JETS (Sugar Land, TX)
 * Mentor (Mentor, OH)
 * Solon (Solon, OH)
 * Fayetteville-Manlius (Manlius, NY)
 * MIT Invitational (Cambridge, MA)
 * Homestead (Cupertino, CA)
 * Mountain View (Mountain View, CA)
 * Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (Denton, TX)
 * One of many hilarious SciOly.org school wikipages, although this one is written partially in Chinese so it gets bonus points.
 * Irvine High School (Irvine, CA)
 * Dank memes can't melt steel beams.

R.I.P. these wonderful sites:
 * Mounds View (Shoreview, MN)
 * PALY (Palo Alto, CA)
 * Troy (Fullerton, CA)