Satellite SO

[boho]

Satellite SO is Science Olympiad's learning model that allows students to demonstrate their achievements at their school when larger public gatherings are still prohibited. It allows hands-on activities, but involves some adaptation by students, coaches, and tournament volunteers.

This new model requires student to be attending school in a physical building; it is intended for practice play and for situations where conditions in your state allow for students to be at K-12 school but large public gatherings in a single location are prohibited. Essentially, teams will take tests and record/report on their devices, either through video or written logs. This could be done synchronously, or asynchronously, on a single day after school, or over several days.

Clearly this model presents shortfalls in academic integrity and the scope of hands-on activity, but it capitalizes on the amount of time Science Olympiad teams are encouraged to spend in months-long preparation for competition – building, breaking, studying, making binders, taking quizzes, prepping log books. Teams will need to accept these limitations willingly, understand the academic honor code will be in full force, and they will need to abide by a safety agreement provided by Science Olympiad, Inc.

Event supervisors will have to be comfortable adapting how they conduct and score the events. We’ll be releasing lists of resources to make this possible but there are already tech tools that schools and teachers have been using these last few months like Zoom, Google Classroom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Live that have opened up new ways to communicate, learn and gather for events. States will be given the choice to run or to not run tournaments of this nature and be allowed to choose the platforms and methods of delivery they are most comfortable with.

Visit soinc.org/tournaments to read about the several models of learning Science Olympiad is employing to continue the learning while keeping students safe.

[AlterNSO]

For Satellite SO is there any information for events where things like gym size matters, mainly ping-pong parachute and wright stuff.

[Longivitis]

For Satellite SO is there any information for events where things like gym size matters, mainly ping-pong parachute and wright stuff.

From what I heard since Satellite makes you compete at your school, you would simply just use your school's gym. Homeschool teams, on the other hand, I'm not really sure how they'll do that. But in general, I think the gym size doesn't really matter much.

[AlterNSO]

The big one is Ping-Pong Parachute for the gym size. For example our gym is 24'(ish) tall and another near by school has a 32' tall gym. That's a 25% difference and would correspond pretty well to time aloft. That's a pretty big disadvantage for some schools. For high level teams it would matter for Wright Stuff as well.