Avi Patel (10) and Sanchay Koppa (11) watched the stream of sand piling into a bucket that hung from their Boomilever build, which is a wooden device designed to hold as much weight as possible. The sound of flowing sand filled the room, and for a moment, there seemed to be no issues. Then, a sharp crack interrupted the peace. The room fell silent with all eyes on Patel and Koppa’s Boomilever. Patel said that the team was expecting a good trial due to the amount of testing they have done. Seconds passed, but the structure remained strong despite the gushing weight pulling it down with every grain of sand. After 12 kilograms of sand the wooden frame snapped, marking a new record for Westview Science Olympiad and leading the team to place 11th at the Southern California Science Olympiad States Tournament, April 11.
With 32 teams from across the state competing, this was the final tournament for Science Olympiad this season. With Westview receiving eight medals in the tournament, a leap from last year’s count of one, Patel said that he was proud of the team’s improvement.
“It was really a big improvement,” Patel said. “Everyone worked very hard, and I’m happy with how the results turned out.”
Patel participated in Boomilever, Hovercraft, and Bungee Drop events. Out of the three, he said Boomilever stood out the most to him.
“For Boomilever, we actually did the best we’ve [ever] done before,” he said. “We held 12 kilograms with an eight-gram device this time. From regionals, we looked at what broke. In regionals, we had the top section be extremely strong to the point where it would hold 20 kilograms when we only needed it to hold 15, and we made [the bottom] way lighter than it should have been. Based on that, we distributed the weight that we wanted to put in the bottom section of the boomilever in the top section. We made five or six more [models] for states and tested the efficiency. We ended up finding a balance so that it would not break too early, but we were still really happy when it held the whole thing. We heard a crack in the beginning and we were [worried], but as it went on, it [continued] doing well.”
Patel and Koppa placed 13th for the event. Even without a medal, Patel said he was proud of their build’s performance.
Mihir Konkapaka (10), the vice president of events, earned three of the eight medals the team got. He credits the team’s improvements to the experiences that the returning members gained since last year.
“Last year’s team was [almost all] freshmen coming from middle school Science Olympiad,” Konkapaka said. “But now that we’ve had experience in doing it in high school, we were able to get accustomed much better to the difficulty jump for different events. I’ve been practicing throughout the year and I’m really happy I did well in this tournament.”
Circuit Lab is a hybrid event with two parts: taking an electrical engineering-based exam and building a functional circuit on a breadboard within five minutes. Konkapaka said that doing well in the event fulfilled his goal for the season.
“Circuit Lab was the one event I’ve been looking forward to competing [in States] since last year because it’s something that I have a lot of experience with just from previous studying,” Konkapaka said. “It has been consistently pretty good for the season. I’m glad that I was able to apply my skills and all the learning throughout the season into it.”
Konkapaka was able to go through most events smoothly, but he said the biggest challenge he faced was the time constraint for the lab, which forced him to work under strict time constraints.
“We were going pretty fast through the test portion,” he said. “Then they told us that the lab was only five minutes, which made us a little nervous. But [when] we actually got there, we [realized] that it was something that we have done before to a certain extent. We had some experience with how to wire the transistors. Since we had experience in that [part], we could get that done much faster. It was weighted 30% of the entire score so if you were able to get that done well, and we did. That was probably the biggest reason we did well in the event. We had utilized our whole time, [and since] we knew basically everything in the questions, it was very much a time management challenge.”
Besides Circuit Lab, Konkapaka received third place in Machines and fourth place in Material Science. This was Konkapaka’s second year of competing at the States Tournament.
“I was confident because from the regional performance we were pretty strong,” he said. “I felt well prepared going into [States], and the placements reflected that.”
Konkapaka said he was also very happy to see big improvements in the team and hoped to continue this trend by pushing students through competition.
“A big part of why we did so much better than last year was due to a lot of new competition: not competition from other schools but also within our school,” he said. “We have a lot of new people coming, and that’s pushing everyone to do better, because you would want to get your spot on the team. I think having a bit more competition within Westview is good, because it pushes everyone to do better.”
