National Tournament
The National Science Olympiad competition is held in late May at a different university in a different state every year. Teams either stay in student dorms or nearby hotels.
The competition officially begins with opening ceremonies on the day before Saturday's competition (a Friday). Usually a notable speaker, such as a Nobel Laureate, will give a speech. Following this is the traditional Swap Meet, when all the teams bring bags of state memorabilia to trade with other teams from all over the nation. The most popular items include hats, license plates, t-shirts, and key chains.
Saturday includes several time blocks (this year 6, plus the "impound" time slot at the beginning of the day). Each block includes a 60-minute section for each study event, plus a 15 minute break time for competitors to get from one event to another.
That night, a semi-formal Awards Ceremony is held. It opens with a short speech followed by awarding medals for the top six teams in each event, including trial events (events that do not count to the overall team score). At the end, the top ten teams in each division are awarded trophies.
In some national tournaments, scholarships are awarded to the top teams in each event. For the 2005 and 2010 competitions, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, first-place event winners received full four-year tuition waivers to the university. At the 2006 National Tournament, host Indiana University awarded $7,000 annual scholarships to Division C first place finishers who decided to attend the university for their freshman year. The George Washington University offered Division C gold medalists at its 2008 National Tournament a $20,000 stipend towards attending the university. In 2012, the University of Central Florida offered $30,000 scholarships to the university for first place medalists in Division C. Extra prizes are also given out for certain events: for Disease Detectives (Division C), the first-place team is given t-shirts and a trip for the two competitors and their coach to tour the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility in Atlanta, Georgia.
The theme of the 2009 National Tournament was "The Silver Age of Science" due to the fact that it was the 25th anniversary of the Science Olympiad.
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