NATV recently ran a film quizzing NASH students to find out whether they were “smarter than a 5th grader.” One particular question dealt with the order of the planets in the solar system. When asked which planet is closest to the sun, most students correctly identified Mercury, although everything from Venus to Uranus was said.

While the video raises the question of whether the students on camera are actually smarter than 5th graders, a group of scientifically adept students here at NA are probably smarter than most college grads.  The Science Bowl team consisting of Jiangfeng Chu, Christopher Lee, Shria Moturi, Soureesh Moturi, and Roy Sun recently trounced the competition at the Western PA Regional Science Bowl.

“We started [practicing] in November,” Chu said. “We’ve been having practice each week twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays since then.”

While practicing two times a week starting in November for a competition in April might seem overdone, one look at the difficulty of questions they might be asked at the competition justifies the team’s intense practice schedule.

”There are two types of questions, toss-ups and bonuses,” Chu said. “On toss-ups, each person has five seconds to answer the question, and after it’s read, you can’t talk to your teammates. It’s all individual. Then, if one of the team members gets the toss-up question correct by buzzing in and answering correctly, their team gets to work together to solve a bonus question. So on the bonus question, your team can confer with each other, having 20 seconds to answer the question.”

In regard to the easiest and hardest questions they were asked in the competition, David Ban, who represented a second team from NA, recalled that he had received the question “what is 2 plus 2 times four?” However, not all the questions would be that easy. Chu mentioned that questions involve complex physics concepts that he hadn’t even learned. Ban added that sometimes competitors will know how to find an answer to a problem conceptually, but the actual steps needed to find the answer take longer than the twenty seconds provided.

Chu, a junior, says he’s already looking ahead to next year’s event.