Service

Mission

The Service Branch mission is to foster intellectual, pedagogical, and creative growth within the K-12 STEM community, with a focus on young scholars who have been historically underrepresented. We seek to democratize STEM education by helping our partners prepare for competitive academic tournaments, leveraging a unique learning environment to facilitate students’ engagement with inquiry-based scientific exploration.

Vision

Science Olympiad is a national organization that is primarily known for hosting academic tournaments across America for K-12 students. The tournaments are structured to incorporate approximately twenty-two different team-based events that cover topics in the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. HUSO believes that the competition format of Science Olympiad offers a naturally engaging option for young students to learn more about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics through an extracurricular investigation-based curriculum.

Most importantly, we aim to alleviate the material and operational costs, lack of accessible learning, and the lack of racial representation that serve as barriers to equal participation in Science Olympiad. We believe that Science Olympiad, both as a national organization and as an educational phenomenon, has much room to grow; the pedagogical value that can be harnessed through this unique avenue of learning through tournament preparation and engagement deserves further exploration.