Over the weekend of February 2, Pelham students displayed their scientific knowledge at Byram Hills High School in the regional Science Olympiad competition. Teams composed of fifteen students per school worked together to solve science based questions and tasks specific to their regional competition. Several of these competitions occur in each state, and the top six teams advance onto the state competition for their respective state, and then to the national competition. Pelham placed 13th out of 48 teams in the regional competition, and placed in the top five for some individual competitions.

“Science Olympiad was a really fun experience, especially because you could see so many other people there that were just as motivated as you were,” junior Sophie Xu said.

Juniors Vedika Basavatia, Asher Lal, Peter Wei, Emily Nakayama, and Owin Gong, sophomore Nya Haseley, and senior Ben Glickman were among the competitors from Pelham that placed in their respective individual competitions.

Pelham’s Science Olympiad team has already started preparing for next year’s competition, and are planning to come back stronger than ever before.

Of the challenges the team was presented with, Pelham students senior Richard Che and junior Sophie Xu did the best in the “Write it/Do it” competition, landing a third place win. In this particular event, one of the students in the competing pair was given a pre-made object that they were supposed to describe structurally to the other partner. The team that can get their partner to recreate the object to be as similar as the original was awarded the greatest number of points.