[AstroNet] Winners of 2010 SAASTA Astronomy Quiz announced

[Ina Roos]

Sutherland High School is this year's national Astronomy Quiz winner

A team of four Grade 7 students from Sutherland High School in the Northern
Cape won the national AstroQuiz 2010 finals this year. They beat students
from eight other centres around South Africa at the Quiz finals, which took
place at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Cape Town on
Friday, 29 October.

The Cape Town team of Observatory Junior School came second and Phororong
Primary from Gauteng took the third place.

The teams to make it to the finals have all come through four gruelling
rounds of competition at the centres where they participated in AstroQuiz
2010. Aimed at Grade 7 learners, the first round at each centre involves
teams of four learners. Four quiz rounds reduced this to one team from each
centre.  More than 3000 youngsters participated in the first round of the
Quiz this year.

The AstroQuiz competition has been funded by the South African Agency for
Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA) since 2006. 

The nine participating centres were the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy
Observatory (HartRAO) and SciBono Discovery Centre in Gauteng; Boyden
Science Centre in the Free State; the South African Astronomical Observatory
(SAAO) in the Western Cape and the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)
in the Northern Cape, Unizul Science Centre in KwaZulu-Natal, Mondi Science
Centre in Mpumalanga, North West University (Potch Campus) Science Centre in
North West, and the Vuwani Science Centre in Limpopo Province. The project
was initiated by Sci-Bono and funded by SAASTA during Astronomy Month 2005
and expanded to these nine centres by SAASTA since then.

The questions were tough, but fair," says Philip Steenkamp of the winning
team. They had to answer questions about habitable exoplanets, the size of
the sun, planetary nebulae and many more, and were only four points short of
full marks.

The winning team took home a telescope with accessories and software for
their school, a fancy pair of binoculars for each of the team members and
their teacher, Encyclopedia Britannica and Cosmic Africa DVDs. There were
many other prizes for participants in the finals and all received a gift
pack from SAASTA.

The finalists in the AstroQuiz 2010 competition were: 

HartRAO: Phororong Primary School (Gauteng)
Boyden Observatory: Unicom Primary School (Free State)
Unizul Science Centre: Dundee Primary (KwaZulu-Natal)
North West Science Centre: Potchefstroom Central School (North West
Province)
Mondi Science Centre: Ndawonye Primary School (Mpumalanga)
SALT: Sutherland High School (Northern Cape)
SAAO: Observatory Junior School (Western Cape)
Sci-Bono: Weltevreden Park Primary (Gauteng)
Vuwani Science Centre: Pietersburg English Medium Primary (Limpopo)



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.saasta.ac.za/pipermail/astronet/attachments/20101102/a598fff8/attachment.html>