On March 15, Fossil Ridge High School’s Science Bowl team won big at the Colorado Regional High School competition for the second year in a row. The team triumphed against sixteen other schools while defending their title as champions.

This year’s winning team consisted of Sophie Wang, Jackson Dryg, Kary Fang, Colin Magelky, and Quentin Perez-Wahl. Science Bowl is an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) with Tom Mason, the STEM Education Outreach Coordinator at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, organizing everything.

For someone who may not understand how the whole process works, Wang, a junior, explains that it is “a lot like Jeopardy, except we work in teams and all of the questions are about science.” There are two forms of responses: toss-ups or bonus questions. “Toss-ups are where anyone on either team can buzz in and answer the question, which scores four points. If your team gets the toss-up, then you will get an opportunity to answer the bonus question as a team, which is worth ten points.”

Because of the struggles of COVID-19, Science Bowl is still operating virtually, meaning they were not able to compete against another team this year. Instead, they were read an entire round and had to work together to answer as many questions and get as high of a score as possible.

The questions covered a wide range of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics including biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, earth and space sciences, and energy. Students were asked three rounds of eighteen questions during the preliminary rounds, with twelve teams advancing to the elimination rounds. The final four teams were Fossil, Rock Canyon High School, Cherry Creek High School, and Cherokee Trail High School.

The team says that the most challenging part of this competition was “definitely… the stress.” With the competition being virtual, they had to sit at home and stare at the spreadsheet that would tell whether or not they had advanced. “Waiting and watching built up a lot of anticipation, and every time it was updated, we’d immediately go and tell everyone.”

Wang expressed, “What makes our communication effective is the fact that we’re really trying to have fun with the competition. On top of that, we’ve known each other for a long time now, so we each know that we can trust each other.”

Their next competition is the National Semi-Finals on May 21. If they make it to the top eight at that competition, then they will be flown out to Washington, D.C. for the National Championship in early July.

The team would like to voice that Science Bowl is an “extremely fun, challenging, and rewarding experience.” They are always happy to welcome new members who are interested in expressing their love and knowledge of the sciences.