Blue Crab Bowl Competition This Weekend at ODU
The Blue Crab Bowl, the Virginia regional qualifying competition for the National Ocean Science Bowl, will be held at Old Dominion University March 2 and 3. Sixteen teams from 12 high schools will be tested on their knowledge of ocean-related subjects.
A team from Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School in Virginia Beach has won each of the last four Blue Crab Bowls, and a 2012 team from the school will be trying for a fifth consecutive championship.
The annual event is made possible by a partnership between ODU's Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences and Virginia Sea Grant's Marine Advisory Program at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), College of William and Mary.
The winning team from the Blue Crab Bowl will face about two dozen other regional winners in the National Ocean Sciences Bowl on April 19 in Baltimore.
Preliminary activities for the bowl in Norfolk on Friday, March 2, will include a welcome by ODU Provost Carol Simpson and a talk by ODU marine scientist Mark Butler.
Competition rounds are Saturday. An initial round-robin portion of the event begins at 9 a.m.; double-elimination rounds begin at noon and the championship rounds at 2:35 p.m. The awards ceremony will follow immediately after the final round, at about 4:30 p.m.
All segments of the event take place in Webb Center on the ODU campus, and are free and open to the public.
Teams will be from these high schools: Bishop Sullivan Catholic, Virginia Beach; Churchland, Portsmouth; Chesapeake Bay Governor's School, Bowling Green Campus; Chesapeake Bay Governor's School, Glenns Campus; Chesapeake Bay Governor's School, Warsaw Campus; Governor's School for Science & Technology, Hampton; Isle of Wight Academy, Isle of Wight County; Grafton, York County; Patrick Henry, Hanover County; Fauquier High School, Fauquier County; and Seton, Manassas.
Victoria Hill, an ODU assistant research professor in oceanography, is the ODU coordinator. Carol Hopper Brill, a marine education specialist with the Virginia Sea Grant program, is the overall coordinator. To learn more about the Blue Crab Bowl, visit www.vims.edu/bcb.
Hill said the ocean-related questions posed to the students will test knowledge of biology, chemistry, physics, navigation, geography and also history and literature. More than 50 faculty members, staffers and graduate students from VIMS and ODU donate their time to ensure the success of the competition, she added.