Science Bowl Season Has Begun!

Science Bowl Season Has Begun!

2/25 Northeast Regional Middle School Science Bowl at MIT
3/4 New England Promise Regional High School Science Bowl at UConn-Storrs
3/18 Maine High School Science Bowl (virtual)

5/13 Lexington Ocean Bowl Spring Tournament (virtual)
5/14 Alumni Ocean Sciences Invitational (virtual)

Although it may seem like PMD has not doing much lately since there are not volunteer opportunities for the start of every calendar year, actually PMD has been quite busy wearing new hats, hosting the virtual Maine High School Science Bowl plus supporting in-person regional competitions of the National Science Bowl (NSB) for the first time since the pandemic began. (We’ve also been busy collecting seed requests online from Boston community gardeners in preparation for PMD’s 3/11&12 project.)

New endeavors like the Maine competition take much more effort to organize than repeated events. For 2022-23, PMD has pivoted to hosting our first NSB competition and supporting more in-person NSB competitions while the National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB) takes a hiatus from official competitions to reorganize, meaning that PMD is sadly NOT hosting its traditional Blue Lobster Bowl (MA) and Quahog Bowls (CT-RI) like it has the past 24 and three years, respectively, nor supporting a half dozen other virtual regional ocean sciences bowls like we did in 2021 and 2022.

It’s a lot of work to host a new science bowl for the first time. Team recruitment, particularly due to challenging pandemic years, is difficult since many teachers have left/retired or been assigned to advise different activities, and there is a whole, new infrastructure and SOPs at NSB to learn. Furthermore, since NSB provides no grant awards like the NOSB did, we’ve been attempting to fundraise to replace this significant earned income on which PMD has relied.

After PMD’s 24-year run, a gap year without any ocean sciences competitions would be wrong, so PMD (with support from The MathWorks) is also supporting the Lexington (MA) high school team hosting a virtual high school ocean sciences “LOBSTr” tournament on May 13 & 14 AND hosting our own, virtual Alumni Ocean Sciences Invitational (AOSI) for NOSB alumni on 5/14 morning. We’ve recruited eight AOSI teams and are now busy writing and checking our own buzzer (toss-up and bonus) questions, plus Team Challenge Questions (TCQs) without traditional support from NOSB. (If you would like to write buzzer questions for AOSI, please contact me <Lori at pmd dot org or call *82,1-781-963-0373) for parameters and a template.)

Links for the descriptions (“View More Info”) and online applications (“Sign Up”) are live for all four PMD science competitions: https://www.pmd.org/get-involved/#volunteer and the student-organized LOBSTr.

If you can afford to, you can donate to support PMD’s science competitions. Visit https://www.pmd.org/donate/#support_campaign for details. Ty!

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