Physics Bowl provides more challenges for physics students

Lily Kazemi
Reporter

On Tuesday, Apr. 5, all Honors and AP Physics students participated in the annual Physics Bowl held at the high school. This comes on the heels of the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) team’s impressive win at the March 15 JETS state championships at New Haven University. Varsity “A” and Junior Varsity brought home gold medals in their divisions, and Varsity “B” earned bronze.

JETS, a program that challenges students to use what they have learned in their math and science classes to answer a series of difficult questions, places students into teams of eight based off of their performance in tryouts. Varsity teams are open to all students in Honors and AP Physics, while the JV team is for anyone who wishes to join. According to sophomore Quinn Gruver, who is also JV captain, the tryouts paint a good picture for what the team is actually like. “Mr. Hague, who’s one of the advisors, told us about the program in my AP Chem class, and there was a series of four or five tryouts with similar problems to what JETS does,” she said. “The top eight scorers made the JV team, and the top scorer became captain.”

This year’s Varsity “A” team is led by senior Izzy Meckler as captain, with seniors Kimmy Glerum, Brant Hoffman, Stas Kurtukov, Peter Larson, Kate O’ Hanlon, Evan Shapiro and Ben Stryker. Varsity “B” team features seniors Ben Charas, Nelson Conover, Jake Hennessy, Alexandra Jonker, Taylor Parsons, Portia Schultz and Nick Zeiss, with senior Matt Brady as captain. The JV team consists of sophomores Jack Alexander, Harrison Besser, William Burger, Olivia Hompe, Jessica Laird and freshmen John O’Rourke and Dichen Yin.

The competition at New Haven was comprised of two separate tests. The first, a written set of 80 multiple choice questions, enabled the organization to judge each of the 50 participating Connecticut teams based on state achievement. Kimmy said that she loved having the opportunity to work with her fellow team members during this half. “Essentially, each person gets 10 questions but it’s collaborative so if you finish your set early you can trade, or if you’re having trouble with a certain question, you can turn to the person next to you and ask for help,” she said.

Though the results of the state championship have already been announced, each team is still awaiting their placement on a national level, based off of the second competition. “The second competition was a series of eight essay questions that were sealed and sent down to Washington,” Quinn said. “Hopefully we’ll get them soon. We’re still waiting, but last year we came in third so hopefully we’ll be able to repeat that.”

Izzy said that the competition went very well, especially since the problems were very close to the work done in class. “We just do problems similar to those that we practice with in class,” he said. “My favorite part is a three-way tie between winning the state competition, talking with friends on the bus to and from the competition, and lunch.”

Though a majority of the participants in the Physics Bowl are a part of JETS, it’s different from what they are used to. Instead of having questions that they can collaborate on, each student must take an individual multiple choice test. “Unlike the JETS, which is a team with applied problems, the Physics Bowl is similar to the type of physics that you find in a textbook,” Kimmy said. “It is more basic knowledge, but it’s still pretty difficult.”