In Pursley Hall 114, students battled head-to-head in the name of science. Three teams participated in a battle of the brains as they scrambled to answer jeopardy-style questions about smelly chemicals, binomial nomenclature, size of matter, noble gases, science fiction, science facts and much more.
The SELU STEM club hosted their first annual science bowl tournament last Wednesday as a fun way to raise funds for the organization. Students and teachers were allowed to form teams of 4-6 people and compete for $120 in gift cards. Though no teachers participated in the bowl this semester, Dr. Linda Munchausen and Dr. David Norwood watched as part of the audience.
Students rallied their troops in hopes of being declared the winner with bragging rights. They each picked their team name, with the names being: Yellowstone Extremophiles, Pathogenesis and The 4 Amigas. The teams went neck-to-neck with each other until the very end where there was only 200 points between the 1st and 2nd place winners.
“There were 3 teams that participated and each one of them went down to the wire. The winners of the Science Bowl were: Suyogya Karki, Erin McDuff, Benjamin Schnadelbach and Codie Sullivan: Team Pathogenesis. Congrats to them,” said Andy-Kam xiam Lam, the STEM club president.
The STEM club, also known as the integrated science club, stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
“The purpose of the club is to have an interdisciplinary group,” said Munchausen who is STEM club advisor. “We already have a biology group (BUGS) and a chemistry group (ACS Affiliates) and a physics group (SPS).  STEM is a mixture of all science disciplines and is open to anyone interested in science, even if they are majoring in something else. The idea is to increase the excitement and get some ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas and thinking.”
Three rounds of questions were provided with some questions providing a challenge. As everyone was leaving, one thing was for sure, participants and audience members alike were already excited for next year’s science bowl.
“I went to the quiz bowl because my friend Codie invited me to be on his team. He needed an upper level biology major,” said McDuff, a biology major. “I competed because the event sounded like fun, and it was a way to learn new things that I either haven’t been exposed to or forgotten. I thought the event was awesome. We had pizza and two professors showed up for the first round, which made it fun and encouraging knowing that some teachers were interested. We were asked questions of all various types, which I liked because I learned some new stuff while competing.”
The STEM club is always open to new members who wish to research and learn about science together. If anyone is interested in joining the STEM club, they can contact Lam at [email protected] for more information.