The De Soto High School Science Olympiad team participated in Olathe North High School’s “O-Town Throwdown” meet on Nov. 18.

“I think the meet went well overall,” senior Kay Craven said. “I was pretty happy with how we did. We placed somewhere above middle-ground, I would say, so that’s a pretty good start to the season. It’s interesting to see the different approaches to Science Olympiad, because our approach is definitely a lot different than [schools like] Pembroke Hill.”

Science Olympiad sponsor Laura Sixta thought the meet went relatively well for the first meet of the season, some of the success being attributed to the new additions to the team.

“I think we have some strong, new members, people who are dedicated to their events,” Sixta said. “We have a lot more people interested in build events, which we definitely needed people willing to tackle those difficult engineering challenges. I think that kind of rounds out our team well.”

While having a good time at the meet, the team has some more things to improve upon, according to senior Lina Al-Tahhan.

“[The meet] was fun. It was cool seeing all the different teams, different spirit wear, some teams had fun hats and other teams had [lots of spirit],” Al-Tahhan said. “For the next meet, though, [team members needs to] prepare more, help their partners, communicate and show up.”

Sixta elaborated on some specific things that the team will be working on for meets later in the season.

“[The team needs to work on] making sure that we have all of the events covered and structural integrityーlike with the bridge buildingーand making sure we’re up to date with all of the best designs and that we have all of our resources compiled so we can do the best when it comes to [events like] Rocks and Minerals, Disease Detectives, all those things,” Sixta said.

Building upon experience will also help further the school’s Science Olympiad team in the future, Craven says.

“I think [improvement] is one of those things where experience really counts. Having some experienceーlike looking through old files [with event research and examples] that we maybe didn’t have the time or the instruction to use early on in the seasonーis going to be helpful.” Craven said.

Individually in specific events, Craven placed first in Remote Sensing, freshmen Brent Smith and Avery Hantla placed fifth in Hovercraft and seniors Zach Deibert and Micah Faulds placed fifth in Rocks and Minerals. Overall, the team placed 11th out of 22 schools.

Continuing with the season, Craven stated that the team aims “to do well at Regionals this year” and work its way to State in Wichita in several months.