Eight Blue Mountain Middle School students participated in the Chemical Education Foundation’s (CEF) You Be the Chemist (YBTC) Challenge at BASF Corporation’s headquarters in Tarrytown, NY in March.
The YBTC Challenge is an interactive academic competition that engages students in grades 5 through 8 in learning with their peers about important chemistry concepts, scientific discoveries, and laboratory safety.
This year the competition had a new format, with students competing as a team, rather than as individuals. The two BMMS teams placed 4th and 5th out of 11 teams from across New York State. At times, the students were responding to chemistry questions at a high school, and even college, level.
The students who participated were Aidan Schneider, Brody Marcus, Sarah Nabi and Sebastian Soto (on Team 1) and Luca Tucci, Alexandra Numeroff, Shaun Saleem and Sarah Bianci (on Team 2).
“I’m so proud of our Blue Mountain students who decided to take on this challenge,” said Assistant Principal Anecia Bell-Jefferson.
BASF has supported the Hendrick Hudson School District in many ways, including participation in the Project Lead the Way Partnership Team overseeing biomedical and engineering courses at the high school, awarding an annual scholarship to a graduating high school senior, and bringing BASF Kids’ Lab, a program that uses hands-on experiments to build interest in science, to BMMS.
Due to the coronavirus crisis, the state and national levels of the YBTC competition have been canceled.
