Article published on March 19, 2012 by the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
It’s not uncommon these days to hear people lament the lack of boys and girls interested in math and science.
But a group of students at Imagine MASTer Academy appears to be bucking the trend.
After a successful season, the charter school’s Science Olympiad team is heading to the state competition in Bloomington on Saturday.
Since October, the team of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders has been meeting after school each day to practice for the daylong competition, which will involve tests on anatomy, astronomy, food science and other subjects.
Students will also test the effectiveness of towers, vehicles and other machines they’ve built in the weeks leading up to the tournament. Students split into teams for each activity, so not every one participates in the same exercise.
“There’s a lot of memorization, and you have to take a lot of tests,” eighth-grader Kiya Arden said. “A lot of us didn’t expect to get past regionals.”
Arden and other team members spent Wednesday testing a wooden trebuchet, a kind of catapult, built by one of their teammates.
Using graphs, the team was tracking how far the machine could fling bean bags of varying weights using a set counterweight. Each time the trebuchet launched the projectiles, the girls beamed and laughed.
“It’s fun to do with all my friends and to learn more about science,” eighth-grader Claire Cummings said. “It’s a social thing, but I would do it even if they weren’t in it. It’s our thing, instead of a sports team.”