2009 New Jersey Chemistry Olympics Today

I interrupted my vacation to participate in the New Jersey Chemistry Olympics as I've done for many years. NJIT hosts this competition for high school chemistry students throughout the state. I organized and judged an event called the information search which consists of two parts:

• Students bring in a model of a molecule and are judged on its accuracy. This year they had a choice of several pesticide molecules. If they picked a more complex molecule, their score would be higher.
• Students must answer questions about pesticides from electronic resources. I proved a suggested list of databases, but they may "Google away" if they would like. They must answer the questions within 25 minutes.

The competition went very smoothly this year. I had two graduate students assisting me with the information search while an NJIT chemistry professor and a high school teacher evaluated the molecular models.

A team from Tenafly High School won the information search and the entire competition as well.