Albuquerque Public Schools
Success at the Science Bowl
Teams from Eisenhower Middle School and La Cueva High are headed to national competition.
What do the Science Bowl and the Super Bowl have in common?
The winner revels in the triumph.
Five students from Eisenhower Middle School could tell you all about it after the school’s Science Bowl team upset longtime reigning champion Los Alamos Middle School and earned a trip to the Department of Energy National Science Bowl.
“It was incredible,” said Eisenhower teacher James Goodman, one of three coaches for the team. “Los Alamos had won the last five (regional Science Bowls), so this is a huge deal for us. We’re so excited.”
Eisenhower’s winning team was composed of Jonathan Little, Aaron Brown, Maddie Michael, Beatrice Berhman and Thomas Quirk. Jessica Thomas, a student success strategies teacher, and Daniel Riley, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, are co-coaches with Goodman. Another team from Eisenhower finished third.
In the high school competition, La Cueva High School made it a sweep for Albuquerque Public Schools following a victory over defending champ Los Alamos. Both La Cueva and Eisenhower will participate in the national competition in Washington, D.C., April 24-28.
Science Bowl is a team-based competition in which students answer science and math questions. There’s a buzzer system and a time limit – “almost like a game-show format,” Goodman said.
At the national event, teams will compete in a round-robin format, and winners will go into a double-elimination tournament.
Goodman, in his third year at Eisenhower, said the team was thrilled by the victory – in part because the middle school competition in New Mexico, including teams from Desert Ridge, Albuquerque Academy and Los Alamos, is tough.
But he acknowledged there was particular sweetness in finally overcoming Los Alamos, the scourge of the middle school division.
“The team was just really, really motivated,” Goodman said.
The same could be said for the La Cueva team of Joaquin Headly, Amandeep Prasankumar, Lucas Riley, Joseph Wang and Hiro Jau, which came back from an early-round loss to capture the high school regional championship.
Lucas Riley’s father, Dan, has helped coach the Eisenhower team since he was a student there. The elder Riley said Science Bowl success at both high school and middle school levels is an indication of the kind of academic talent that can be found in public education.
“While private schools often receive a lot of attention for academics, I have found a lot of very smart and talented kids within our public school system over the last seven years,” he said in a news release from Sandia National Labs.