What You'll Learn

You’ll always learn something different. Each year, the Academic Decathlon^® selects a new theme for teams all over the country to explore. The theme shapes an entire course of studies—and brings it all together. The more years you participate in Academic Decathlon, the more themes you’ll master. And, since our curriculum team develops these themes with special attention to national content standards, you’ll find you’re becoming not just a more knowledgeable Academic Decathlete, but a stronger all-around student.

The theme for the 2024-2025 Academic Decathlon is Our Changing Climate.

The U.S. Academic Decathlon® is excited to announce that the overall curricular theme for 2024–2025 will be Our Changing Climate. Following is some general information on the topics in each of the subject areas.
 

▪ART: The art curriculum will offer an introduction to environmental and environmentalist art.
 

▪ECONOMICS: The economics curriculum will cover fundamental economic concepts, microeconomics, and macroeconomics and will include a thematic section on the economics of climate change.
 

▪LITERATURE: The literature curriculum will present an introduction to environmental literature and will include critical reading, one long work of literature, and selected shorter works. The long work of literature will be Solar Storms by Linda Hogan.
 

▪MATHEMATICS: The mathematics curriculum will provide an overview of permutations, combinations, algebra and statistics.*
 

▪MUSIC: The music curriculum will focus on the topic of music and the natural world.
 

▪SCIENCE: The science topic will be an introduction to environmental science.
 

▪SOCIAL SCIENCE: The social science topic will be climate change in the past and present.

 

The full subject area outlines will be posted on the U.S. Academic Decathlon website <www.usad.org> on May 1 and will be published in the U.S. Academic Decathlon Study Guide, which will be available on May 15.
 

* The 2024–25 mathematics curriculum and materials will be the same as were used for the 2021–22 U.S. Academic Decathlon.