Scioly.org

chia wrote: That's where I feel a lot of teams might struggle... science activities in general are overshadowed by virtually everything else, not just sports but even speech, debate, "business" clubs like DECA (that's big at our school at least) which show up consistently on the announcements and leave no room for anything else. I was thinking about how many kids are in all of the science teams at my school all together (without overlaps) and it comes out to around 50, which is a pretty abysmal turnout considering my school's population is almost 3000. Of course advertising helps a lot as does actually doing well, as has been stressed by most of the above posts, but it's so hard to get out of the vicious cycle of nobody caring... [/pessimism, whoops]

They'll care if you win! Sad to say. And cookies. And "bring a friend." You'll be surprised how vicious peer pressure is; kids go into Honors and AP courses that they have no right to be in, just because they want classes with their friends... Why not hook 'em into SO?

And the admins only care because it makes the school look great to the school board and other things like that. We've had to bring in our Sounds of Music instruments to board meetings, in the past.

We're a little over 3K here, but our population is mostly super achieving Asians (Milpitas is mostly Viet, I think? At least it seems so). So we're lucky to have had a lot of our swim captains, badminton varsity members, track stars, NHS/CSF presidents, and DECA presidents (or combinations of all of those) also be super nerds. We also don't have too many science clubs on campus; there's SciOly, Science Bowl, and just this year Science Club. Science Bowl is under our SciOly's jurisdiction, as we actually have an officer position for starting it each year, and then Science Club was started by one of our members, and most of the people in the club are also Science Olympians. x)

Wow... We have a little over 3500 this year and we stille struggle to find 30 dedicated people... In fact we have kids that make our A team and don't bring 2 beakers to states because they never read the rules for thermo...

Well, technically you only need 15. We used to struggle to field one full team.

Ours is on the morning news, broadcasted to all the classrooms. Also, that's quite sad, since we have like 100 people.

EASTstroudsburg13 wrote: We used to struggle to field one full team.

It's going to be painful to choose our 15 and two alternates this year. Our recruiting this year ended up with us getting lots more people, mainly by inviting them to try it out. Also, bugging people who should be doing it is very effective.

That awesome moment when a kid comes into the SO lab for the first time and says "Wow! That's so cool!" to practically everything he sees!

Some of that might be because you have an entire lab dedicated to SO.

What I personally feel is better than mass advertising is asking other science teachers recommend scioly to their smartest kids. And those who try out are generally better than those brought by mass advertising because they're already the top of their class.

Also, people at my school generally fight for just 7-8 poistions on the team; it is basically guaranteed the junior and senior veterans will make it on. Plus, our coach does informational meetings the June before. Overall, that makes it virtually impossible for freshman to join the team, because the sophomores, juniors, and seniors have generally already been studying for 2 months.

But yeah, I'd say just ask teachers to bother/nag their smart students to join.

KMHS_Dave wrote:That awesome moment when a kid comes into the SO lab for the first time and says "Wow! That's so cool!" to practically everything he sees!

That's cute

We don't actively recruit at Gelinas, but we announce our first meeting over the loud speaker. Also, we have an "evernt fair," where second and third year event do'ers give little posterboard presentations about the different events. Somehow, we still started the year with over 100 kids. Now, we're down to 70 or 80 something.