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The Super Bowl of science

BoardBuzz was excited to see this story of some high school students who really know their stuff. This team of four high school students placed first in the National Science Bowl by correctly answering six graduate-level questions. The event, sponsored by the Department of Energy, is a "competition among teams of high school students who attend science seminars and compete in a verbal forum to solve technical problems and answer questions in all branches of science and math." Like the spelling bee, but with science questions instead. The winning team, from Santa Monica High School in California, beat out 66 other schools.

"They did not crack under pressure," said Coach Ingo Gaida, a science teacher at the school. "I'd been telling them all year long they had the potential to do this. This was the strongest team we've ever had." The team began preparing for the bowl in September, and since January had been practicing daily in the fields of math, earth science, astronomy, biology, chemistry and geology. The level of difficulty of some questions in the final round was equivalent to graduate school, Gaida said. The question that clinched the win: "For the Maclaurin series of the function e2x, what is the coefficient for the x4, in the simplest form?" Answer: 2/3. "There were some close games, but I always felt like we had a good chance to win," said Dimitry Petrenko, 18, a senior who has been on the team for three years. "I feel satisfied, almost relieved like I've done my job and can graduate." The other team members are Alexandre Boulgakov, 16, Marino Di Franco, 16, and Ian Scheffler, 17. The team won a trip to the International Youth Science Forum in London this summer, $1,000 for the school's science department and a 6-foot-high trophy.

To say that BoardBuzz is impressed would be a gross understatement! Congrats to the team. We can't wait to see what you're up to next!

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on May 07, 2008 (boomark / email).