Four of six Harker teams advanced to the California Creativity State Finals for their stellar efforts at a Destination Imagination regional tournament on March 7 at Independence High School in San Jose.

The advancing Harker LS teams were the “Spirits of Wisdom” (Eliot Gruzman, Kevin Ke, Elina Sendonaris, Michael Moncton, all Gr. 5 and Kavya Seth, Gr. 4), the cleverly named Gr. 3 “Starbucks Lovers” (Neeraj Sharma, Rishi Iyer, Matthew Lee, Kalen Frieberg and Michael Kwan) and the Gr. 3 “Creative Kings” (Rajiv Movva, Derek Yen and Rahul Bhethanabotla). Representing the MS at the state finals was the Gr. 6 team “Veni! Vidi! Vici!” comprising Sahiti Avula, Maya Nandakumar and Neha Sunil.

Other teams competing at the March 7 event were the Gr. 3 “Fascinating Foxes” (Meena Gudapati, Aliesa Bahri, Vivian Huang, Catherine Lee, Sanjana Avula, Jerrica Liao and Makenzie Tomihiro) and the even more cleverly named “Flaming Tootsie Rolls from the Planet Pluto” (Maxwell Woehrmann, Albert Drewke, Kevin Xu, Sid Chari, Adrian Chu, Derek Kuo). Although these teams did not make the state finals, all students involved performed admirably.

Each team was given a challenge that required teamwork and creative thinking. These challenges required extensive planning in advance of the competition and each dealt with a different topic, such as theater arts, design and construction.