Antelope Valley College has positioned itself as a pathway to aerospace industry employment. They offer an Aerospace, Industrial Arts and Applied Technologies field of study, and in 2016 added a bachelor’s program in Airframe Manufacturing Technology, specifically designed for the needs of local aerospace industry employees.
A Bachelor of Science degree in computer science is in the planning stages through the California State University Bakersfield AV Campus.
They even have the Undergraduate Research Center, mostly for the hard sciences, that connects students with mentors, internships, research opportunities, and coaches them in scholastic writing. Some of the students graduate or transfer from AVC having already published peer-reviewed scholarly articles, according to Dr. Zia Nasani, the center’s coordinator.
So, it makes perfect sense that since 2013, AVC’s campus has hosted the Southern California Regional Science Olympiad. The first AV Regional Science Olympiad at Antelope Valley College took place March 16, 2013, with 20 middle school teams competing.
The Science Olympiad is a national all-volunteer non-profit organization that allows schools from elementary through high school to compete in events that test their reasoning skills, scientific knowledge, ingenuity, and dexterity.
In 2024 there were events such as Robot Tour, where students had to build a robot and program it to execute certain maneuvers, all while being timed.
In the Scrambler event, teams “design, build, and test a mechanical device, which uses energy from a falling mass to transport an egg along a track as quickly as possible and stop as close to the center of a Terminal Barrier without breaking the egg,” according to the SO website.
Other events have names like Tower (building one), Meteorology, Fossils, Optics (lasers), Potions & Poisons, Air Trajectory, Disease Detectives, Reach for the Stars, Microbe Mission, Crime Busters, and Road Scholar.
The volunteers are mostly college students and professors at AVC, according to Ryan Wong, the Los Angeles Regional Director.
Many of the volunteers are also past participants, like Wong, an undergraduate at University of California at Los Angeles majoring in computation and systems biology, a STEM field he says is “up and coming.”
“We love to have the competition at AVC because the local schools are very passionate about science education, and we want to spread information about science to that area.”
In 2023, Quartz Hill High School’s team made it to the state competition. They scored in fifth place overall, and in the Top Ten in eight of the 23 events.
In the 2024 Regional Science Olympiad, Antelope Valley schools scored as follows:
Division A (elementary school) Five of the six top schools were from Palmdale, Calif.: the number one school was Horace Mann Elementary from Beverly Hills, and in descending order were Los Amigos School, Golden Poppy Elementary, Tamarisk Elementary, Palmdale Learning Plaza, and Manzanita Elementary.
Division B (middle school) Two schools in the Top 20 were from the outer edges of the Antelope Valley: Ridgecrest Intermediate (11th), Gorman Learning Plaza (13th), and the Palmdale Learning Plaza came in 14th.
Division A (high school) The top three schools in this division go to the State Science Olympiad at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. This year, the Palmdale Aerospace Academy came in third and competed at CalTech.
At the Cal Tech state competition, 15 students from TPAA competed against the top 32 teams from around Southern California. Their strongest performances were in Optics (10th), Tower (14th), and Forensics (16th). The 2023-2024 competition season was the most successful in the history of TPAA, according to Yvette Todd, one of the team’s coaches.
Contestants in Division C (high school) are 15 or fewer on a school team, and there are 23 events to cover. Because of this, it behooves a team to recruit members with a wide variety of interests and knowledge. A team can forgo an event if they really can’t cover it, but they will lose points on their overall score.
Todd said that some of the events are a hard sell. While many events are active, like building robots, towers, using lasers, or solving a crime from evidence, others are just taking a test. She calls those “orphan events.”
The yearly process is to go to the SO website, peruse the events, and start dividing them up, or recruiting fellow students who may be interested or knowledgeable in certain subjects.
Some of the Science Olympiad sponsors are The Aerospace Company, Northrop Grumman, CalTech and the Southern California Gas Company.
To volunteer for the 2025 Regional Science Olympiad at AVC, contact Ryan Wong at director@socalscioly.org. For information on the 2025 events, or organizing a team at your school, go to
https://www.soinc.org/events/2025-division-c-events.
