Irvine high schoolers win Science Bowl regional championship at JPL

Over the weekend, Irvine's University High School team beat 20 Southern California schools at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to stamp their ticket to Washington D.C. in April. 

They'll be competing in the National Science Bowl Championship — think Jeopardy with the brightest young minds in math, physics, biology, chemistry and earth as well as space sciences. 

"The questions that they are asked are well beyond most high school curriculum," said coach David Knight. "They have to be able to, on their own, read AP or college-level books for fun on the weekends during the summer. And oftentimes not just read a certain textbook, not just once, but two, three, four times."

When these brilliant pupils are asked a question that they don't entirely know the answer to, they can lean on their teammates for help.

"One of the hardest questions I got was an astronomy question regarding a distance to a star which involved a lot of calculations," said team member Wendy Cao. "I knew the equation but I'm not especially good at math so I asked my teammate to help me out and luckily we got it right."

University High is known for its rigorous academics and high-achieving students which is why their teams between 2018-2021 made it to the Science Bowl finals. 2022 was a rare year when the team failed to reach the championship, however, it just motivated them more than ever to do well this time around. 

"I think what's special about it is we're the one team that gets to represent Orange County, Los Angeles County, Riverside County and so on," said team captain Ben Fan. "I think that's really special for us. 

Whether they win or lose, these aspiring scientists have big career goals of becoming astrophysicists, organic chemists or chemical engineers.