Grade 8 students Matthew Huang, Neil Movva and Andrew Zhang; grade 7 student Jonathan Ma; and Aneesh Samineni, grade 6, placed second in the regional Science Bowl competition, held March 12 at the NASA Ames Research Center. The Science Bowl is a national competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and features teams of middle school students answering very difficult questions about a variety of sciences in a quiz bowl environment. The team was well coached by Joseph Chu, an alumnus of Lynbrook High School, who trained the students on Fridays after school.

After qualifying in the initial round robin faceoffs, the Harker team headed on to the elimination rounds, where they lost a very close and intense game in the 11th round against San Ramon’s Gale Ranch, who defeated Harker in the round robins and also took second place nationally in last year’s Science Bowl. “Even the moderator, judges and scorekeepers were spellbound at the end of round 11,” said Vandana Kadam, faculty coordinator at the Science Bowl event and middle school Mathematics Department chair.