This year the Olympiad was held on January 26-28 on the basis of the Karelian Institute for the Development of Education (KIRO) in full-time form. The Olympiad was attended by 33 schoolchildren of grades 9-11 from the Petrozavodsk urban district, Kondopozhsky, Suoyarvsky, Kalevala, Belomorsky, Pitkyaranta, Sortavalsky, Olonetsky, Lakhdenpokhsky, Prionezhsky, Muezersky districts. The members of the jury of the Olympiad were employees of the Institute of Biology, Ecology and Agricultural Technologies (V. I. Androsova, S. N. Lyabzina, N. A. Sidorova, A. A. Starodubtseva) and the Medical Institute of PetrSU (L. E. Elaeva, P. S. . Sobolev).
As usual, the Olympiad included two stages: theoretical and practical. However, the practical stage this time was not in an experimental form, in the classrooms of PetrSU, where students would conduct experiments, describe biological objects on the basis of factual material, but in the form of text assignments, tasks in which the objects were represented by photographs.
This form of holding allowed participants from districts of Karelia to carry out assignments in their schools under the supervision of cameras without coming to Petrozavodsk.
This year there were 6 stations on the practical tour: “Botany”, “Morphology and physiology of plants”, “Zoology”, “Man”, “Microbiology” and “Genetics and bioinformatics”. The Olympiad tasks were complex, diverse, and required a large amount of accurate knowledge from the participants.
As the results of the Olympiad showed, the most difficult tasks for the children this year were tasks in genetics and bioinformatics, as well as plant physiology and botany, but the participants coped best with the questions of zoology and human anatomy. The jury members, when analyzing the tasks, made a number of recommendations to the children which sections should be paid attention to when preparing for the next Olympiad.
