The team has been practicing since December, often for five to seven hours a day and on weekends.
Catherine Hrbac (left) and Xiyu Wang, both juniors at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, practice an experiment to identify unknown powders by the way they react chemically. The two are part of the school’s Science Olympiad team that will be competing nationally on May 22.
Manlius, NY -- There is one event that continues to haunt members of the Fayetteville-Manlius Science Olympiad team year after year: the bottle rocket.
The event requires students to launch a rocket, but what’s tricky is there’s an egg inside the makeshift rocket attached to a parachute. That parachute is supposed to unfurl and keep the egg airborne for a specified amount of time.
“It gets frustrating, and a lot of it is just Syracuse weather, because it’s so unpredictable,” said Brittney Buckingham, 16, a sophomore and F-M Science Olympiad member. “It’s hard to get enough data to know what to do make it work right.”
Next weekend, the team of 15 students will be competing in the national Science Olympiad. The competition, featuring 120 teams facing off in 46 categories, will be May 22 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign .
This is the team’s 12th time in the nationals, and eighth time in a row as state champions. The team placed fifth at nationals last year.
This year’s F-M team has six sophomores, and so is relatively young, said F-M High School teacher Jamie Cucinotta, who advises the team. This year, 70 students tried out for this team; seven were selected.
This year’s group has been practicing since December, often for five to seven hours a day and on weekends. Over spring break, the team got together and held a bottle-rocket building day so they could try and work out the kinks. It’s that sense of camaraderie that helps give F-M its edge, students say.
Cucinotta agrees that Bottle Rocket is the most consistently challenging, but the team excels at other events, like their mousetrap-powered car and their Mission Possible Rube Goldberg-type device, which starts by dropping a golf ball onto a mousetrap and then goes through 10 steps before raising a flag. They’ll run that event 10 times a day to make sure nothing goes wrong.
One of this year’s knowledge events is birds, and that team has been gathering online photos, making flashcards and visiting Cornell University. Another group of is studying time and its history.
“We’re really dedicated to this and we’re a cohesive group and I think that encourages us,” said Jiechen Chen, 17, a senior and a team captain. “We want to be No. 1, but we also want to be the best we can.”
There are 25 events, and students work on several events. Junior Xiyu Wang, 17, is on the Sumobot event, where students build their own robots which then “fight” in the ring.
“We rebuilt our robot four times,” Wang said. “We always find something wrong, and then that’s connected to the other parts. But we were undefeated at state’s.”
The team looks forward to demonstrating its knowledge and skills at the nationals, students say. “Rather than taking a test and getting a score, this is a way of showing what we can do against the smartest kids from all over the country,” said Catherine Hrbac, a junior.
As the team prepares for the big day, Cucinotta said she’s treating the girls on the team to manicures where they’ll get their nails painted green for good luck. F-M’s school color is green.
Elizabeth Doran can be reached at edoran@syracuse.com or 470-3012.