By Khalida Sarwari
There will be some new faces at the regional competition of the National Science Bowl at NASA Ames Research Center on March 2. Joining a pool of talented middle school students from several other Bay Area schools will be four students from St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Saratoga.
The students–Nishka Ayyar, 12, of Saratoga; Dhruv Sudesh, 12, of Cupertino; Ronak Sathyanarayana, 12, of San Jose; and Mathias Insley, 13, of Sunnyvale–will represent their school in the middle school category of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s National Science Bowl. All four are in the seventh grade.
Motivated by a love of trivia games, Nishka, the team captain, proposed joining the competition–as well as another trivia game called Quiz Bowl–to her school. St. Andrew’s then sent out emails to students to determine who would be interested in taking a 20-question test on science and math. The four students who scored the highest were chosen for the team, with the next four tapped for a backup team.
In preparation for the competition, Nishka and her teammates have been practicing for about two hours once a week and an additional two hours during school breaks. At the practice sessions coach Mythili Sankaran, who is also Nishka’s mother, reviews concepts or introduces new ones to the students. Some of the content is a little more challenging than the rest, Sankaran said.
“Especially chemistry–that is usually the hardest for them,” she said. “Some concepts they understand, some they’ve never seen before.”
Sankaran said she has created her own content for the study sessions and assigns the students to research them on their own time using the Internet and science books. She asks the students questions that have been posed at previous National Science Bowl competitions, and occasionally, she has them watch National Geographic videos. Despite the limitations that come with encountering material they haven’t learned yet, the students for the most part are enjoying the learning process, said Sankaran.
“They’re very bright kids, very enthusiastic kids,” she said. “I think they have a fair chance.”
Nishka said she is both excited and nervous about the competition.
“We probably won’t know everything, but we’ll go in there and we’ll try our best,” she said.
During the competition, the students will come together as a team to answer challenging math problems and prove their knowledge of a number of areas including astronomy, biology, earth science and physics.
The winner of the regional competition will receive a fully paid trip to Washington, D.C., to compete in the national contest April 25-29. There the students will be tested with additional difficult questions, and the ultimate winner will win prizes for the team members and their schools.
Dhruv said he feels confident about his team’s chances.
“I feel we can do well if we apply ourselves,” he said. “We still have two weeks to go, and if we utilize that time well, we have a pretty good chance in the competition.”
Win or lose, Mathias and his fellow teammates are looking forward to the opportunity to compete.
“I know it’s going to be fun,” he said.
Now in its 23rd year, the competition was established to encourage students to excel and ultimately pursue careers in the areas of science and math. Today, it is one of the country’s largest science competitions, with more than 225,000 students that have participated in the event to date. This year, roughly 9,500 high school students and 4,500 middle school students are expected to compete.
St. Andrew’s is one of two Saratoga schools taking part in the regional competition, the other being Redwood Middle School.
The competition will take place on March 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field.
For more information about the National Science Bowl, visit science.energy.gov/wdts/nsb/.
