Updated: April 13, 2016

Also in February, a group of Harker seventh graders — Sidra Xu, Betsy Tian, Arya Maheshwari, Jason Lin, Alexander Kumar, Nicky Kriplani, Paul Kratter and Jonathan Chao — competed in a middle school TEAMS competition and scored highest in the country in all divisions. A total of 98 teams entered the competition, which consists of four topics, two essays and a design challenge. The students will head to Nashville this summer for the national stage of the TEAMS competition.

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This past weekend, two teams of Harker students earned first place finishes at the TEAMS (Test of Engineering Aptitude in Math and Science) competition. The event, held at San Jose State University, consisted of a two-part exam that lasted about three hours. Upper school math teacher Anthony Silk said Harker faced “tougher competition” this year, but still managed to earn first place in both the grade 9-10 and grade 11-12 divisions.

The first place team in the grade 9-10 division consisted of sophomores Jerry Chen, Amy Jin, Michael Kwan, Jimmy Lin, Sahana Srinivasan, Justin Xie, Shaya Zarkesh and Randy Zhao. The first place grade 11-12 team was made up of juniors Steven Cao, Neymika Jain, Evani Radiya-Dixit, Venkat Sankar, Manan Shah, Arjun Subramaniam, Peter Wu and David Zhu.

New to the competition this year was a design challenge that had students building the highest tower possible using just 20 sheets of 8.5” x 11” paper. Zhu, who captained the first place grade 11-12 team, called the challenge “a great way for us to develop on-the-spot problem solving and designing skills that typically cannot be trained with written problems.