GHHS students buckle down before National Science Olympiad Tournament

Thousands of students from across the country cheered jubilantly inside the Kohl Center on Friday night during the opening ceremony for the National Science Olympiad tournament at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among them were teams, coaches and parents of students from Grand Haven High School, and White Pines and Lakeshore middle schools. The ceremony kicked off the annual science competition that Science Olympiad co-founder Gerard Putz said is meant to elevate academics to a higher level of public awareness.

Jordan Travis

May 21, 2011

Putz said the competition, conceived in 1985, aims to celebrate scientific achievement by youth at “a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for athletics.”

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Carolyn Martin agreed.

“It is beautiful to see what athletes can do with their bodies,” Martin said. “It’s just as important and just as beautiful to see what we can achieve with our minds.”

The opening ceremony included science experiments performed by Bassam Shakhashiri, a chemistry professor at UW-Madison, and physics professor J. Clint Sprott.

Shakhashiri kicked off the event by exploding a balloon filled with hydrogen, and continued the antics by blowing the tops off of plastic bottles. He touched them off with a hand-held Tesla coil, and set them off in sequence while a band played Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”

The day’s earlier activities were in sharp contrast to the loud and boisterous ceremony. Students quietly prepped for their events, some studying for hours at a time.

To read more of this story, see today's print edition of the Grand Haven Tribune.

The results of Saturday's competition will be posted here late Saturday or early Sunday, and published in Monday's Grand Haven Tribune.