2024 UT Coaches' Clinic Resources

Good morning, 

We would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who attended our Coaches’ Clinic event this September. Thank you so much for traveling all the way to our campus and being such attentive and engaged audience members! Slides and recordings of our workshop can be found here. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, recordings for some of the workshops are not available, so if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and we can put you in contact with the workshop presenters. 

Best regards, 

The ATX Science Olympiad Team 

2024 UT Fall Invitational Announced

ATX Science Olympiad is excited to announce our tenth annual invitational tournament on Saturday, October 26th, 2024! Registration will open at 12:00 PM CST on Monday, August 26th for Texas teams and at 12:00 PM CST on Wednesday, August 28th for all others here. Each school may register up to two teams at the time of registration with the option to put a third team on the waitlist. If spots remain after September 16th, we will begin pulling additional teams off the waitlist.

Our full plan and ongoing updates will be made available here. Please bookmark or otherwise keep track of this page.

This tournament will have a fee of $225 per team. As always, we do not require any payment at the time of registration. Payments are due September 26th, 2024.

If this registration fee (or due date) is a barrier to your team’s participation in our tournament, please shoot us an email at atxscioly@gmail.com so we can work something out together. We want every part of this tournament to be as stress-free as possible and aim to be flexible and accommodating at every step of the way.

If you are a coach or student looking to network and attend workshops to prepare for this season, stay tuned for more information about our annual Coaches’ Clinic.

Furthermore, if you know a Science Olympiad alumni that is willing to write or assist in an event at the tournament, they can sign up to do so here.

Registering with your State Organization

Per NSO policy, all teams are required to register with their state organization prior to participating in invitationals. Texas teams will need to register through TSO’s website.

Best regards,

Akanksha Acharya and Darsh Shah, Tournament Directors

2024 UT Coaches Clinic

Good morning coaches and parents,

On Saturday, September 14th, we are holding our seventh annual Coaches’ Clinic from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM. The event will be held in-person on the University of Texas at Austin campus, and breakfast and lunch will be provided to attendees.

This year, we are looking to provide workshops that provide a more in-depth look at specific events and more guidance on how coaches’ can deal with logistical challenges from team building to fundraising. We are hoping to provide attendees with a space to network with other coaches and interact with our presenters, who have experiences as former competitors, state/national medalists, and event supervisors for regional/state competitions.

Please RSVP for our coaches’ clinic here! Parents and students are also welcomed to attend, so please share this information with your teams. Finalized schedules will be sent to individuals who RSVP.

As always, this event will be free of charge, and we look forward to seeing you on our campus soon!

Warmest wishes,

The ATX Science Olympiad Team

2023 UT Fall Invitational Announced

ATX Science Olympiad is excited to announce our ninth annual invitational tournament on December 2nd, 2023! Registration will open at 5:00 PM CST on Wednesday, August 30 for Texas teams and at 5:00 PM CST on Friday, September 1st for all others at https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite23Registration. Each school may register up to two teams at the time of registration with the option to put a third team on the waitlist. If spots remain after October 11th, we will begin pulling additional teams off the waitlist.

Our full plan and ongoing updates will be made available at https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite2023.

This tournament will have a fee of $200 per team. As always, we do not require any payment at the time of registration.

If this registration fee is a barrier to your team’s participation in our tournament, please shoot us an email at atxscioly@gmail.com so we can work something out together. We want every part of this tournament to be as stress-free as possible and aim to be flexible and accommodating at every step of the way.

If you are a coach or student looking to network and attend workshops to prepare for this season, stay tuned for more information about our annual Coaches’ Clinic.

Furthermore, if you know a Science Olympiad alumni that is willing to write or assist in an event at the tournament, they can reply to this form: https://tinyurl.com/UT23ES.

Best regards,

Darsh Shah and Aditya Rao, Tournament Directors 

ATX Science Olympiad | atxscioly.org

2022 UT Fall Invitational Announced


We hope you are all having a cool summer! ATX Science Olympiad is excited to announce our eighth annual invitational tournament on October 29, 2022! Registration will open at 5:00 PM CST on Wednesday, August 17 for Texas teams and at 5:00 PM CST on Friday, August 19 for all others at tinyurl.com/UTInvite22Registration. We will also guarantee registration for the first 20 Texas teams in each division. Each school may register up to two teams at the time of registration with the option to put a third team on the waitlist. If spots remain after September 6th, we will begin pulling additional teams off the waitlist.

Our full plan and ongoing updates will be made available at https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite2022.

This tournament will have a fee of $150 per team. As always, we do not require any payment at the time of registration.

If this registration fee is a barrier to your team’s participation in our tournament, please shoot us an email at atxscioly@gmail.com so we can work something out together. We want every part of this tournament to be as stress-free as possible and aim to be flexible and accommodating at every step of the way.

If you are a coach or student looking to network and attend workshops to prepare for this season, stay tuned for more information about our annual Coaches’ Clinic.

Furthermore, if you know a Science Olympiad alumni that is willing to write or assist in an event at the tournament, they can reply to this form: https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite22ES.

Best regards,

Lawrence Appel and Aditya Rao, Tournament Directors

2021 UT Fall Invitational Announced

Please find updates for the Fall 2021 Invitational at https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite21.

Science Olympiad is excited to announce our seventh annual invitational tournament on October 30, 2021, in-person! Registration will open at 2:00 PM C.T on Monday, August 16 for Texas teams and at 2:00 PM C.T on Wednesday, August 18 for all others at https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite21Registration. We will also guarantee registration for the first 20 Texas teams in each division. Each school may register up to two teams at the time of registration with the option to put a third team on the waitlist. If spots remain after September 6th, we will begin pulling additional teams off the waitlist.

This tournament will have a fee of $135 per team. As always, we do not require any payment at the time of registration.

If this registration fee is a barrier to your team’s participation in our tournament, please shoot us an email at atxscioly@gmail.com so we can work something out together. We want every part of this tournament to be as stress-free as possible and aim to be flexible and accommodating at every step of the way.

If you are an alum interested in helping run our tournament, please fill out this form [https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite21ES] to apply to be an event supervisor as soon as possible. Alternatively, you may fill out this form [https://tinyurl.com/UTInvite21ERC] to join the Exam Review Committee - we’d love to have you!

2021 Regional Exams Released

First off, a massive thank you to everyone who helped make this year’s UT Regional possible! We know that the journey wasn’t easy, and we’re very grateful that you stuck with us through the winter storm and the ensuing chaos.

Next, if you didn’t catch our speakers Dr. Jackson and Dr. Passalacqua at the Awards Ceremony, check out the recording on our official YouTube channel here.

Finally, event exams from the tournament have been released and are available. Another big thank you to everyone!

Regional Tournament Postponed to 3/27

ATX Science Olympiad event supervisors and tournament organizers were heavily affected by Winter Storm Uri, as were many of our prospective attendees. As a result, the 2021 Regional Tournament was postponed and is now being held on the weekend of March 27th, 2021 on Scilympiad.

You can find our official tournament updates in the Regional tab under Tournaments. Our most sincere thoughts are with everyone who is recovering from the storm.

Game On Tournament

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ATX Science Olympiad is excited to announce our first ever Game On Tournament on Sunday, December 6th, 2020 from 3:00 PM CST to 4:00 PM CST! This competition is primarily intended for Division B students, but a limited number of Division C students may also participate to relive their glory days as competitive Scratch programmers. Furthermore, individuals who are not currently part of an active Science Olympiad team are welcome to register. Registration is at this link: forms.gle/6LiVSmAGz2WmZJqx9. It is open now for students from Texas, and will open for students from other states on Monday, November 16th. We will guarantee spots for the first 20 individuals in Division B and the first 10 individuals in Division C, with competitors from Texas being given priority. Registration will close on Sunday, November 29th or when our tournament capacity is reached, whichever is earlier. This tournament is completely free for all students from any state. Further details about the tournament can be found in our FAQ at this link: bit.ly/35nAOMT. We hope you’ll join us!

P.S. If you’re an alum that’s interested in helping us grade, please reach out to us at atxscioly@gmail.com - we’d love to have you!

Want to Help Us Support New Scioly Teams?

Hello everyone! Our organization is excited to announce the ATX Science Olympiad: Urban Schools Initiative HornRaiser, a fundraising campaign aimed at supporting new Science Olympiad teams in local Title I schools. We greatly appreciate any financial support you can provide and would love if you shared our effort with anyone who will listen on social media!

The Urban Schools Initiative (USI) is an outreach program piloted in inner-city Chicago in 2004. USI supported new Science Olympiad teams with financial resources and customized mentoring, thereby removing some of the barriers between inner-city students and team-based STEM competitions. USI entails a 3-year start-up plan wherein the sponsoring entity helps a school start a new Science Olympiad team and then gradually tapers off direct financial assistance as the team becomes self-sustaining and Science Olympiad becomes more established in the school district.

ATX Science Olympiad (SciOly) seeks to replicate this success in AISD with a focus on Title I schools and under-represented minority (URM) students. We strongly believe in the benefit of fun, competitive, and team-based STEM exploration, but recognize that Title I schools are often under-resourced and understandably face significant barriers in offering these types of experiences to their students. The ATX SciOly iteration of USI seeks to provide financial resources and a robust mentorship network to a small cohort of local Title I schools with the purpose of helping them start and sustain Science Olympiad teams. We aim to increase the accessibility of Science Olympiad to these schools using a 3-year model similar to the one piloted in Chicago.

Fall 2020 Event Slate Clarification

We’d like to thank everyone who attended our Fall 2020 Coaches’ Clinic! We hope the event was informative and got you more excited for our virtual tournament at the end of October.

However, there were some questions about our event slate, and we want to fix any confusion. Please find the most recent and up-to-date version of our October invitational event list here. To clarify, this information will change between tournaments, with this list being for the Fall 2020 event. Thank you for your patience and we hope this answers any questions ya’ll had. If it didn’t, or if you have more questions, feel free to send us an email!

Fall 2020 Coaches' Clinic

NOTICE

The schedule and corresponding Zoom links for the Fall 2020 Coaches’ Clinic have been released. If you or your team registered and have not received this information, please reach out to atxscioly@gmail.com.

ATX Science Olympiad is happy to announce its third annual Coaches’ Clinic on September 26th, 2020 from 8 am to 1 pm! The Coaches’ Clinic has traditionally been a place for Coaches to network with each other while attending workshops on how to prepare for particular events and manage a team. The Clinic will be facilitated by ATX SciOly former competitors and a former team coach. Our presenters who are former competitors have thousands of hours of collective Science Olympiad experience as event supervisors, national test writers, and former team captains.  In the current circumstances, we believe it is more important than ever to learn from and support each other as a Science Olympiad community while we adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

This year, the workshops will be held entirely virtually, with a Zoom link sent out to Coaches (and students!) who RSVP using the form below. Our schedule breakdown, complete with what specific workshops are being held, will be released after evaluating feedback in the RSVP form as to which workshops are in highest demand. See you all there!

Fall 2019 Coaches’ Clinic Breakout Session: Resource Procurement

Fall 2019 Coaches’ Clinic Breakout Session: Resource Procurement

2020 UT Fall Invitational Announced <UPDATED 8/12>

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ATX Science Olympiad is excited to announce our sixth annual invitational tournament from October 23-25, 2020! Registration will open at 1:00 PM C.T on Friday, August 21 for Texas teams and at 1:00 PM C.T on Saturday, August 22 for all others at scilympiad.com/ut-invite.

Due to COVID-19, our tournament will take place virtually. We will run the events listed here. These are the events specified by the miniSO format, without Game On and with the addition of Detector Building. Furthermore, we’ll have a couple of trial events, including the ever-popular Data Science.

This year, the theme for our tournament is accessibility. The transition to virtual events disproportionately impacts certain groups more than others, and we want our tournament to be as accessible as possible to anyone on any team, large or small, regardless of the barriers they face. After consulting with teams and coaches from around the country and reviewing the results of our pre-season survey, here are a couple of changes we’re making:

  • Flexible timing and no event conflicts. Competitors will be allowed to take timed exams during an extended testing window. This way, unstable internet connections, family commitments, jobs, etc. will be less of a barrier to competing. Additionally, competitors will not have to worry about event conflicts, which disproportionately affect teams with less students.

  • Larger and more geographically diverse than ever. This tournament is open to teams from any state. We will guarantee registration to the first 60 teams in each division and first 40 teams from Texas, making it our largest tournament ever.

  • Verified scoring for every test. By using Scilympiad, we can enforce time limits on exams, auto-grade certain types of questions, and have event supervisors score every test. As a result, we can allow a huge number of teams to compete while still ensuring the integrity and legitimacy of the competition at all levels.

Our full plan and tournament policies are available here.

This tournament will have a fee of $45 per team, which is waived for all Title I schools. As always, we do not require any payment at the time of registration. 

If this registration fee (or any other aspect of our tournament, such as having no prior experience with Scilympiad) is a barrier to your team’s participation in our tournament, please shoot us an email at atxscioly@gmail.com so we can find something that works for you. We want every part of this tournament to be as stress-free as possible and we will be flexible and accommodating at every step. We hope to see y’all at our tournament in October!

If you are an alum interested in helping run our tournament, please fill out this form to apply to be an event supervisor or this form to join the Exam Review Committee - we’d love to have you!

Pre-Season Tournament Data Collection Survey

Dear Coaches and Students,

Recently, SOINC released a first round of guidelines for competing in Science Olympiad. In order to serve the Texas and National Science Olympiad Community, we are hoping to run a virtual tournament this Fall based on the "mini-SO" guidelines. We are releasing this survey to gain more insight into the capabilities and goals of potential competing teams before announcing the rules and details of our Fall contest.

If you are interested, please complete the survey by 7/29.