It’s a pretty simple recipe: Take one marshmallow, add flame.
While Saturday’s charred result is unlikely to be part of anybody’s diet plan, the process actually was an exercise in calorie counting.
On Saturday, that meant building a calorimeter to gauge the heat released by a burning marshmallow.
“The students are looking at the chemistry of food,” said Amanda Crochet, chair of the Clark College chemistry department. She was monitoring the Food Science event in a college laboratory. In the just-add-fire phase of the event, “Students measure heat output in a marshmallow,” Crochet said.
It was one of 48 events comprising the 2017 regional Science Olympiad at Clark College. Eleven teams earned spots in next month’s state competition — including five teams from the Camas school district. The high school’s top two teams finished one-two in regionals; Camas middle-school teams went one-two-three. Between its high school and two middle schools, Camas had almost 130 regional participants.
The state event has been part of Camas High School’s annual schedule for years. Camas won five straight state championships before finishing second last year, coach Matt Chase said. Overall, Saturday’s event drew more than 400 students from Southwest Washington, plus teams from the Quileute Tribal School in La Push and from Corvallis, Ore.
The marshmallow-based activity was one of many flavors of hands-on science on display. In the Mission Possible arena, competitors built a 10-stage mechanical device.
“You make a bunch of simple machines that go together to do a task,” said Lili Shore, a sixth-grader at Liberty Middle School in Camas.
She pointed out the elements — first-, second- and third-class levers, wheels, axle, pulley and inclined plane — that all lead to the final objective: raising a small flag over the box containing the Rube Goldberg-style contraption.
“This caught my attention because I like making things,” Shore said.
She has even higher ambitions: “I want to be an aerospace engineer.”
Science Olympiad was created to encourage that kind of thinking, and now the STEM concept — science, technology, engineering and math — is getting a boost from focused academic programs.
A prominent example is Vancouver’s iTech Preparatory, where Emily Blakeman is a sophomore. Her school “is based around STEM,” Blakeman said as she waited to fly her hand-crafted helicopter. It was one of five events on her schedule Saturday.
The school doesn’t field sports teams, so these events give iTech students an opportunity to earn varsity recognition, she said.
The state Science Olympiad will be at Highline College in Des Moines on April 15, with top finishers advancing to nationals.
