Division B – Middle School Events at the Arkansas Science Olympiad State Tournament (2024-2025)
*NOTE: List of Arkansas events will be posted in December
Event names that are in bold font are new this year.
- Air Trajectory: Prior to the competition, teams will design, construct, and calibrate a single device capable of launching projectiles onto a target and collect data regarding device parameters and performance.
- Anatomy and Physiology: Participants will be assessed on their understanding of the anatomy and physiology for the human integumentary, muscular, and skeletal systems.
- Codebusters: Teams will cryptanalyze and decode encrypted messages using cryptanalysis techniques for historical and modern advanced ciphers.
- Crime Busters: Given a scenario, a collection of evidence, and possible suspects, students will perform a series of tests. The test results along with other evidence will be used to solve a crime
- Disease Detectives: Participants will use investigative skills in the scientific study of disease, injury, health and disability in populations or groups of people.
- Dynamic Planet: Participants will demonstrate an understanding of the processes involving the cryosphere of the Earth including glaciers and other ice formations and processes.
- Ecology: Participants will answer questions involving content knowledge and process skills in the area of ecology and adaptations in featured North American biomes (Deserts and Grasslands).
- Entomology: Participants will be asked to identify insects and selected immature insects by order and family, answer questions about insects, and use or construct a dichotomous key
- Experimental Design: This event will determine a participant’s ability to design, conduct and report the findings of an experiment entirely on-site.
- Fossils: Teams will identify and classify fossils and demonstrate their knowledge of ancient life. Tasks will be related to interpretation of past environments and ecosystems, adaptations, evolutionary relationships, and the use of fossils in dating and correlating rock units.
- Helicopter: Prior to the tournament, teams will construct, collect data on test flights, analyze and optimize a free flight rubber-powered helicopter to achieve maximum time aloft.
- Meteorology: Participants will use scientific process skills involving qualitative and quantitative analyses to demonstrate an understanding of the factors that influence world climate and climate change through the interpretation of climatological data, graphs, charts and images.
- Metric Mastery: Teams will estimate and then measure properties of identical objects including mass, area, volume, density, force, distance, time, and temperature. Teams will also perform metric unit conversions.
- Microbe Mission: Teams will answer questions, solve problems and analyze data pertaining to microbes.
- Mission Possible: prior to the competition, participants design, build, test, and document a Rube Goldberg®- like Device that completes required Start and Final Actions through a series of specific actions.
- Optics: Teams must participate in an activity involving positioning mirrors to direct a laser beam towards a target and are tested on their knowledge of geometric and physical optics.
- Poisons and Potions: This event is about chemical properties and effects of specified toxic and therapeutic chemical substances, with a focus on household and environmental toxins or poisons.
- Reach for the Stars: Participants will demonstrate an understanding of late-stage stellar evolution and stellar remnants, and their observation across the electromagnetic spectrum.
- Road Scholar: Participants will answer interpretive questions that may use one or more state highway maps, USGS topographic maps, Internet-generated maps, a road atlas, or satellite/aerial images.
- Scrambler: Teams design, build, and test a mechanical device, which uses the energy from a falling mass to transport an egg along a track as quickly as possible and stop as close to the center of a Terminal Barrier without breaking the egg.
- Tower: Teams will design and build a Tower (Structure) meeting requirements specified in these rules to achieve the highest structural efficiency.
- Wind Power: Teams construct a blade assembly device prior to the tournament that is designed to capture wind power and complete a written test on the principles of alternative energy.
- Write It Do It: One student will write a description of an object and how to build it, and then the other student will attempt to construct the object from this description.
