Fourth Annual Bi-County STEM Challenge held 5/7

On May 7, seven other Bi-County schools joined Odessa for the Fourth Annual Bi-County STEM Challenge. Teams from Odessa, Wilbur, Creston, Davenport, Lind-Ritzville, Sprague and Reardan arrived at the Odessa high school gym at 9 a.m. to compete in the fourth science-based “Junkyard Wars.” Each school brought a team of six students to vie against the other schools for the traveling trophy. The Odessa High School team consisted of Alexa Boss, Griffey Powell, Thorsen Wehr, Carsen Weber, Hunter Bramer and Colby Sooy. The junior-high team was made up of Kiegan Wehr, Patrick Valverde, Tori Weishaar, Josh Clark, Camden Weber and Eric Johnston.

The junior-high engineering challenge was won by Team Reardan, which engineered a device to lower an egg to safety from a high building without causing any cracks.

The science teachers from each participating school provided the teams with two objectives. First the students were divided up into mixed teams comprising members of the different schools. Each mixed team had to engineer the tallest possible building out of spaghetti noodles and marshmallows in just three minutes. After 15 minutes of planning time, seven minutes of preparation time and the three minutes of actual building time, work came to a stop and the team with the tallest tower was the winner at a height of 57.6 cm. The winning team consisted of Odessa’s Carsen Weber, Davenport’s Peyton VanPevanage and Creston’s Ireland Corrigan.

During the second objective, each high-school team used a limited number of supplies to engineer a robot for hauling eggs across a battle arena. The team with the most points was deemed the winner.

They even worked through their lunches. After the dust settled, Team Wilbur was the winner of the Fourth Annual Bi-County STEM Challenge and took back the illustrious Golden Flask Award.