Two teams from Harker took first place in their divisions in the multiple choice portion of the annual Test of Engineering Aptitude in Math and Science (TEAMS) competition, which took place last Saturday Feb. 20 from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at San Jose State University.

Six teams of eight self-coached students participated in the event: four in the freshman-sophomore category and two in the junior-senior division. The contest involved two parts: the first involved students taking a multiple-choice exam, and the second part consisted of three essays related to the contest’s theme and a design challenge in which contestants competed to build the tallest paper tower possible.

“I did the hands-on design part, and that was really fun because I got to work together with my team to build something.” Katherine Tian (9) said “I think we did really well, too, so that was a nice bonus.”

Each team was allowed to choose what component of the theme they wanted to cover, and most groups assigned individuals separate topics in order to divide the work. The overarching theme of this year’s competition was efficiency, but it covered a wide range of topics including the economization of manufacturing processes, lenses, space travel and genomics. This wider variety of subject matter is different from last year’s competition, when the theme focused upon environmental issues such as hydroelectric, solar and nuclear power.

“The different themes affect the kinds of multiple choice questions asked and the theme of the essays,” said Shaya Zarkesh (10), who worked on the topic of Microscopes, Telescopes and Lenses. “[My topic] had tougher formulas, like Snell’s formula, which posed some challenges to solve the problems quickly and accurately. However, this year’s essay topic was easier, since the topic was a bit narrower and focused — no pun intended — on a specific problem.”

Harker teams took first place in both the 9th/10th grade division and the 11th/12th grade division for the multiple choice portion. The winning team in the younger category consisted of sophomores Jerry Chen, Amy Jin, Michael Kwan, Jimmy Lin, Sahana Srinivasan, Justin Xie, Shaya Zarkesh and Randy Zhao. The group received a score of 67 out of 80, six points above the second-place team.

Jerry, the team captain, reflected upon his team’s experience having to prepare themselves for the competition instead of being instructed by a teacher.

“I think one of the main things is figuring out what to do,” he said. “Each year is really different, so sometimes it doesn’t really help to do past problem sets, but I think it’s still worth doing them because it gives you an example of a format for the competition. I think that was probably the main challenge: figuring out and finding all the resources, because you don’t have a teacher guiding you.”

Jerry Chen discussed how his team won first place and what future TEAMS competitors should do in order to receive a good ranking in the contest.

The leading team in the junior-senior category comprised of juniors Steven Cao, Neymika Jain, Evani Radiya-Dixit, Venkat Sankar, Manan Shah, Arjun Subramaniam, Peter Wu and David Zhu. Last summer, this team made it to the national level of the competition and placed second in the freshman-sophomore division.

Neymika, a TEAMS participant since her freshman year, described her favorite part of participating in the event.

“I would have to say [my favorite part] is working with the people that I work with because they really know what they want and they can really go forward — it makes me more passionate about the subjects I find and research,” she said. “They’ve taught me a lot about teamwork and collaborative effort [and] overall knowing when to ask for help and when to do it yourself.”

Overall results from the state level contests, combining the multiple choice, essay and hands-on design scores, will come out in May. They will indicate whether teams scored high enough to qualify for nationals, which will take place from June 28 to July 2 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, TN.