{"id":10368,"date":"2025-10-18T23:37:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T23:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/10368\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T23:37:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T23:37:08","slug":"hillsborough-county-public-schools-science-olympics-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/10368\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillsborough County Public Schools’ Science Olympics returns"},"content":{"rendered":"

TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Hillsborough County Public Schools hosted its annual district-wide \u201cScience Olympics\u201d at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa on Saturday.<\/p>\n

Kindergarteners through fifth graders faced each other in friendly engineering competitions, from marble roller coasters to marshmallow flyers.<\/p>\n

What You Need To Know<\/p>\n

Hillsborough County Public Schools hosted its annual district-wide \u201cScience Olympics\u201d at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa
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More than 1,200 students from more than 130 schools\u00a0participated
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Each grade level had a different event based on school curriculum<\/p>\n

Joshua and Miha are fourth graders at Essrig Elementary School. For a couple of weeks, they\u2019ve been learning about energy and motion through marshmallow launchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we did the marshmallow launches cause it moves in position. It changes cause that\u2019s how motion is, because motion changes directions where it goes,\u201d Joshua said.<\/p>\n

The students paired up and designed their own launchers out of cubes, paper cups and rubber bands.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe created the cup with more tape than rubber bands so it would stick on really good and it wouldn\u2019t fly away with the whole thing,\u201d Miha said.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A marshmallow launcher created at Hillsborough County Schools’ “Science Olympics.” (Spectrum News)<\/p>\n

To get to the \u201cScience Olympics\u201d competition, students had to have the farthest marshmallow launcher out of their grade in their elementary school.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were testing it out, and out of all the fourth grade, we got to, I think, eight meters,\u201d Miha said.<\/p>\n

More than 1,200 students from more than 130 schools participated in the engineering-themed challenges. Organizers said student engineers will use the skills they learned at the competition throughout their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it becomes not just something I read in a textbook, but something I\u2019m using in my life,\u201d science coach Kristen Skinner said. \u201cIt really sets that foundational love of science and that understanding of why we learn in school and how it translates into real-life opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n

All the participants also got a free ticket to the MOSI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Hillsborough County Public Schools hosted its annual district-wide \u201cScience Olympics\u201d at the Museum of Science…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[4996,9995,113,276,115,135,137,136,1374,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-10368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-app-education","9":"tag-app-latest-education-stories","10":"tag-education","11":"tag-hillsborough-county","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-tampa","14":"tag-tampa-headlines","15":"tag-tampa-news","16":"tag-tyler-oneill","17":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}