Tonight I went to the coaches meeting for the Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad at Pattengill School in Ann Arbor. They had information about the competition, and workshops for the coaches of the various events. In the workshops they explained in more detail how the events will work and gave some ideas about how coaches can prepare their teams for the events. The Science Olympiad is an annual event for 2nd-5th grade students and Max’s school came in third overall. Max’s teacher Lisa Lava-Kellar happens to be the 5th grade science teacher at his school and is the head coach for the school team. I’m coaching the team for write it, build it. In this event, 4 kids participate, the first 2 go into a room where they shown a structure made up of up to 20 pieces of various items typically from a place like scrapbox. They get 25 minutes to analyze the structure, and write up a detailed instructions for how to reproduce it. They have to describe the parts and figure out what order to assemble them in. No illustrations are allowed. At the end of the time, the instructions are handed to the other 2 teammates who have to are given a bag of the same pieces and have to use the instructions to try and reproduce the structure. This will actually be quite a challenging event as are all the others. This should be a good learning experience for the kids and I’m looking forward to it.