Science Olympiad is a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of K-12 science education, increasing interest in science for all students, creating a technologically-literate workforce, and providing recognition for outstanding achievement by both students and teachers. These goals are achieved by participating in regional, state and/or national Science Olympiad tournaments, incorporating Science Olympiad into classroom curriculum, and teacher/coach training clinics and institutes.
To strengthen both the content of the events and real-life applications, Science Olympiad maintains partnerships from industry and organizations. Since 1999, the Astronomy event has been supported by the Chandra E/PO Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Lead Educator for Chandra, Donna L. Young, is the National Science Olympiad Event Supervisor and with the support of the Chandra E/PO office has made considerable contributions to the organization’s mission – including presentations at coaches clinics and summer institutes.
In an effort to further expand support for the Science Olympiad coaches clinics and institutes to coaches that can't attend, the Chandra Education & Outreach group has recorded a set of videos of Chandra educator Donna L. Young presenting the Astronomy coaches clinic content to a group of local Science Olympiad coaches and teams. These videos will enable any coach or team to understand the upcoming year’s competition. The current set of videos includes content, resources, and suggestions on how to best prepare for 2012 competition. Webinars for both the Astronomy and Reach for the Stars events for 2013 will be posted on the Chandra website in December, 2012.
The AAVSO has also supported the Science Olympiad through its NSF sponsored Citizen Sky Project, which was incorporated into the 210-page Coaches Manual written by Donna L. Young. The manual, with extensive and detailed content, problem sets, and resources was written as a guide to assist teams in competing successfully is available from the National Science website. The AAVSO is also posting all national events for Reach for the Stars and Astronomy, including answer keys, to provide study materials for national competition. Some state events may also be posted.
Complete information about the National Science Olympiad organization is available at http://soinc.org/
The event materials and coach's guide for recent astronomy events are included here, organized by year:
Both the the Astronomy and Reach for the Stars 2013 webinars are located at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/olympiad_2013.html [chandra.harvard.edu]