Olathe North science team heads to D.C.

Many students spend their spring breaks goofing off or taking a vacation, but four Olathe North High School students were studying — for a very good reason. Next month, they will go to Washington, D.C., to compete at the National Science Bowl.

Juniors Dylan Honors, 17, and Arvind Subramanian, 16, and seniors Connor Seacat, 18, and Triton Wolfe, 17, will take on teams from all over the country as they answer questions about everything from chemistry to astronomy.

All of them are in the Distinguished Scholars program at Olathe North, focusing on science. Their sponsor, science teacher Amy Clement, said she thinks it’s the first time the Olathe School District has sent a team to the nationals.

The students are taking their preparations very seriously and have even developed their own study method. Wolfe took practice questions provided by the National Science Bowl and assembled tests for his team.

“Triton designed a bunch of practice tests we can take to see what areas we excel in or some areas we might need to work in, and he does a bunch of data analysis with it,” Honors said. “It looks pretty cool.”

Wolfe keeps track of the questions each person missed on the practice tests and what topic each question was on so they can figure out which team member might take the lead on a particular subject question.

“In a way, it’s practice, because we’ll take the test. Then we’ll look at the answers and see how we did. But it also lets us know what areas we excel in and don’t need to study so much in and what areas we could do studying in,” Seacat said.

When it comes to studying, the team tries to divide things up evenly.

“We kind of take two approaches to it. On some of the more focused topics, such as math, we delegate that to one person — Arvind,” Wolfe said. “On some of the other ones that are much larger topics, such as chemistry, we all take parts of it. That way no one person gets overloaded.”

Being in the Distinguished Scholars program for science helps them, because they take more science classes than students normally would and get into subjects such as organic chemistry and electronics.

“We get exposure to the electronics and the electromagnetic stuff that a lot of (students from other schools) might not get to by the time they enter the competition,” Subramanian said.

Still, some of the topics don’t come up much in the classroom, so the students really have to rely on their own studies to be prepared for the competition. Because the U.S. Department of Energy sponsors the competition, there are many questions dealing with energy-related topics.

Another thing they had to practice was using the buzzers they’ll have in the competition.

“Before we went to the regional competition, we practiced with the actual buzzers, because a lot of the competition is getting used to when you can buzz in, when you’re allowed to say your answer, because you can get disqualified from a question if you buzz in incorrectly,” Clement said.

All of them are looking forward to the trip, the competition and maybe making some new friends.

“One of the things I’m most excited about for nationals is all the smart people I’m going to meet there,” Honors said. “There are going to be people that are just like us and probably better than us there that have the same interests as us.”

And it’s not just the idea of meeting new people that’s so exciting for them — it’s the opportunity to learn from each other.

“I find that smart people from different places have different thoughts on different things, and I’m just really interested in how different people think on all these topics” Wolfe said. “I always come back from (local events) with new ideas. How many new ideas would I get from a national competition?”

This story was originally published March 29, 2016 at 11:04 PM with the headline "Olathe North science team heads to D.C.."