Students take over WinSport Saturday for APEGA Science Olympics

More than 1,000 students from grades 1 to 12 participate in a number of engineering and geoscience challenges

WinSport was taken over by a different sort of competition Saturday.

It was the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) Science Olympics, which featured more than 1,000 children from Grade 1 to Grade 12 taking on challenges of the scientific rather than athletic variety.

“They had two challenges today,” said Keely McPhee, Outreach Manager for the APEGA, explaining what a group of Grade 1 to 3 students were doing.

“So one challenge, they’ve had three months to work on. They created a prototype and brought it here for testing. For that challenge, they created a nest for water birds that was both stable, could float and could also help camouflage the bird.

“They are also participating in a mystery challenge today. So (that involves) a challenge that until today they didn’t know about -- it’s a complete surprise, and they have all the materials with them to tackle that challenge today, ”So (that involves) practicing some additional skills like time management and how they work in a team."

Rather than being a competition, McPhee said the Science Olympics is very much about collaboration.

“We do scoring a little bit differently,” she said. “We evaluate students against rubrics and against a number of different criteria, including things like teamwork, communication and problem solving.

“At the end of the day, we tally those scores, and students get their final score based on their final how their score fits into a final ranking, so multiple teams can win gold, silver, bronze or the innovator title.”

One team of eight-and nine-year-old boys described the event as a kind of fun, social version of homework.

“What I love about the Science Olympics is we get to learn to work as a team together to decide what we’re going to build and stuff,” said eight- year-old Zachary.

“It’s a fun activity to do,” he added. “It’s not really about winning, it’s about participating.”

For more about the Science Olympics, go here.

With files from CTV’s Drew Miller