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 two dozen 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.
online initiative
As of the 2020-2021 academic year, the vision of HUSO’s service team is to provide remote STEM education to K-12 students through several new online initiatives. HUSO Online is a free virtual academic tournament that encourages participants to engage with various scientific concepts. Moreover, by making it free, we are hoping to make it accessible for all students.
To complement our HUSO Online events, we are planning to recruit a variety of student teachers, video editors, lesson planners, and technical advisors to help make education lessons about our events and general STEM topics; like HUSO Online, these resources will also be free.
Lastly, we are planning to partner with K-12 schools and museums to provide services such as mentorship and online activities. We are especially hopeful that through these initiatives, we can reach the people who might not usually have access to these resources and have an impact on their communities.
