The best young scientific talent in South Florida will be in Boca Raton this weekend.

Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science will host its seventh annual southeast Florida regional competition for the Science Olympiad on Saturday, Feb. 15 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the science and engineering buildings and general classrooms, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus. A closing awards ceremony will begin at 4:15 p.m. on the administration building lawn.

More than 700 middle and high school students from 10 middle and 38 high schools from Palm Beach, Broward, Lee, Martin and Miami-Dade counties are scheduled to compete.

The events in the competition are developed and judged by FAU professors, as well as undergraduate and graduate students. A wide variety of topics in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines are covered, including anatomy, astronomy, water quality, entomology, math, simple and complex machines and more.  Students work in teams of two or more in lab-based events conducting experiments, in knowledge-based events, in taking written tests on research materials, and in engineering-based events building devices that accomplish a task.

Science Olympiad is a national, nonprofit organization begun in 1984 by K-12 science teachers to improve the quality of science education and foster a love of science among students.  Teams from all 50 states participate in the Science Olympiad, one of the premier science competitions in the nation.  Students who win at the regional competitions advance to the state tournament, and those winners compete at the national tournament.  The winners of the 2013 FAU regional competition were Boca Raton Community High School and Archimedean Middle Conservatory in Miami. Both schools, along with Archimedean Upper Conservatory, were finalists in the state competition and advanced to the national Science Olympiad competition in May 2013.

Sponsors for this year’s event include Mathnasium, the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association of South Florida and PersonalLoans.com.

For more information, contact Paige Garrido at 561-297-4526 (office), 954-415-1268 (cell) or pgarrido@fau.edu, or visit: www.science.fau.edu/scienceolympiad/.