The Science Olympiad team exceeded expectations at the regional competition on February 11 at the University of Maryland in College Park. The team won first place for the first time in school history.

“I was really happy when the judges [originally] announced we placed second at Regionals because I was thinking that we might have gotten third. I think everyone else on the team was pretty happy too,” Vice President Hikari Tanaka said.

At first, the judges had miscalculated the final results and put WJ in second place. They caught their mistake and awarded WJ their rightful first place position. This happened after the team left the event thinking they had a second place spot. The judges contacted them and told them of their victory. After winning, the team is guaranteed a spot in the States competition at Johns Hopkins University on April 8. Although this is their first title at Regionals, it is not their first appearance at the states because the top two thirds of teams from regionals move on to states.

“I think we have a solid chance to win states this year,” Tanaka said.
If the team is able to win first at the state tournament, it will be another major achievement because they haven’t been able to do that since 2014. Hopefully, a good showing at Johns Hopkins will propel them to the nationals competition on May 19-20 at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

All of the competitions are split up into five main categories: Life, Personal and Social Science, Earth and Space Science, Physical Science and Chemistry, Technology and Engineering and Inquiry and Nature of Science. Of those five categories, there are three types of events: knowledge-based events, where students answer questions in a test like format, hands-on events, where students perform experiments and engineering-based events, where teams construct a device following a specific event’s parameters and test the device against other teams.