BC Science Bowl team finishes 9th in nation in third trip to finals
While much of the nation’s capital was celebrating on Monday, April 2, a small contingent of students from Bethlehem Central High School had more than one reason to be proud.
For the third year in a row, the school’s Science Bowl team traveled to Washington, D.C. to compete in the national finals of that competitive test of scientific knowledge. This year, the team of five and their coach, science teacher Paul O’Reilly, made their best showing yet, finishing 9th out of the 69 high schools at the match. About 14,000 students nationwide entered regional competitions this year.
The three-day event started on April 30. For senior Austin Mayron, this was his third trip to the capital for the competition. The Science Bowl team has only two chances every year to show off its skills: at regionals and nationals.
You practice for a whole year, then it comes down to 10 games, Mayron said.
BC’s team performed admirably at the regional competition, winning all its games. At the national contest they played in seven round robin games and three double-elimination rounds.
It was also a tough year, said Mayron, who will be attending Caltech to study chemical engineering in the fall.
`In the later rounds the calculations got pretty intense. They’re expecting you to do a lot in 20 seconds,` he said.
And these multiple choice and free answer questions go a bit beyond knowing the periodic table. An example:
`If a satellite moving in a circular orbit is raised to another circular orbit 3-times as far from the Earth’s center and where the kinetic energy of the satellite is 3-times less, by what factor does the centripetal force on the satellite decrease?` (The answer? Nine, for reasons that no doubt make sense to the competitors.)
The team members generally concentrate on their topic of interest and then study it voraciously. Senior Ray Futia (who will study cellular biology at SUNY Binghamton next fall) said he pored over not only his advanced biology textbook but anatomy and molecular biology texts as well. From his experience at last year’s event, Futia reckoned the middle schoolers were answering what were previously high school-level questions.
`The questions were a lot harder this year,` he said.
Other members of the team are good at doing sums in their heads very quickly, and others make sure their know detailed principal of physics and chemistry.
For placing in the top 16 high school teams in the country, the Science Bowl team brought back $1,000 from the Department of Energy for BC’s science department. O’Reilly said he’d like to see that money spent on a video system that attaches to microscopes so students can film their observations and broadcast them to the class.
`I can see across the room if they’re doing the right thing,` he said.
When not competing at the Science Bowl, the team got a chance to see the sights of Washington. (When the new broke late Sunday that Osama bin Laden had been killed, the team woke up O’Reilly to ask if they could grab a taxi to join the raucous celebrations on Pennsylvania Avenue. The answer was in the negative.)
The Science Bowl team will be losing several top players to graduation next year, but junior Michael Clawar said he’s confident the group can make it back to D.C. He wants to make sure the team gets together over the summer to be as prepared as possible.
`We have a lot of young kids we can use on the team next year,` he said. `We should have a good team next year that has a good shot of making nationals.`
For now, most members of the Science Bowl team are turning their attention to the Masterminds competition. It’s a contest very similar to Science Bowl but it covers all subjects, not just the sciences. The first round of the Masterminds competition is on May 16, with regionals on the 23rd.“
