South Bay brainiacs — watch out. A team of five elementary and middle school-aged students in San Jose took home the third-place trophy at a recent nationwide Quiz Bowl competition.
The weekend-long Middle School National Championship Tournament, organized by National Academic Quiz Tournaments and held May 8-10 in Chicago, represented the culmination of a series of qualifying competitions for the 192 participating quiz bowl teams.
The quiz competitions, which use a buzzer system and provide a fast-paced question-and-answer structure, draw on questions from a wide array of subjects, including “history, literature, science, fine arts, current events, popular culture, sports and more,” according to the organizer’s website.
The highest-performing local team was from Challenger School’s Strawberry Park campus, which placed third. Other local teams that rounded out the top 20 include William Hopkins Middle School in Fremont in fifth place; BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, a San Jose school that took eighth place; and Redwood Middle School of Saratoga, which came in 13th.
The Challenger School Strawberry Park team was made up of seventh-graders Samrat Vibhuti, Shrinidhi Venkatakrishnan and Aashin Jain, sixth-grader Aditya Rao and fourth-grader Aanya Goli.
This year shows a significant improvement over last year’s performance, when the team came in 13th place, according to Jain.
The team practices daily, studying and preparing both with a coach and individually, he says.
“We worked really hard,” he says.
What’s next for the team? “Now we have to prepare for the next year and hopefully win first or second,” he says.