By Courtney Russo and Madi Black – News Editors

The Jonathan Law Science Club competed in its second Olympiad of the year at UConn on Saturday, March 22.

Law’s first Olympiad took place at Harvard University last month. The team is led by two science teachers, Ms. Turcotte and Mr. Stanton. Science teachers Mrs. Gagnon, Mrs. Bouchard, and Intern Mr. Lippert also joined the team on the trip.

“I enjoy the invitational events for many reasons,” Turcotte said. “The first reason is that we don’t have to run the events (at the state we work all day running and scoring events) which allows us to interact more with our students and watch them compete in the engineering events.”

At UConn, Law competed against 42 other teams. Their A team placed 11th overall and the B team placed 16th.

Many students on these teams won medals in their events. Two teams placed in the Write It, Do It category – senior Maddy Baranowsky and senior Sana Joshi took second place and senior Deepika Chitirala and junior Harshitha Kothapalli finished third. 

Two other teams placed in the Electric Vehicle category. Senior Matthew Berndt and sophomore Liam Snow finished second and junior David Guery and junior Aryan Sikhinam took fourth.

“In Electric Vehicle, you have to come up with a car that moves and brakes all by itself,”  Sikhinam said. “You don’t know where it needs to stop until the day of the event, so we have to test out a bunch of different distances.”

The club rotates between competing at Harvard, Brown, and MIT in the winter and competing at UConn in the spring. The Winter Invitational allows the team to improve for the spring Olympiad.

“I prepared by testing different scenarios so that my partner and I could compete with known problems, knowing we were prepared,” Guery said.

Some of the events requires students to take a test (Anatomy, Astronomy), while some require a test and lab (Chem Lab, Forensics, Materials Science), some involve a test that revolve around stations (Fossils, Rocks and Minerals) and others are engineering events where students must design, build and test something (Tower, Bungee, Helicopter, Electric Vehicle). 

“For Entomology, we had to identify real samples of bugs,” sophomore Sadie Timmeny said. “Once we identified them, we had to answer questions about them.”

Some additional highlights from the Olympiad included freshman Ziad Elsayed and junior Kayla Markowitz placing sixth in the Robot Tour event, sophomore Jeremiah Dos Santos and Elsayed placing seventh in the Helicopter event, senior Deepika Chitirala and Markowitz placing ninth in Geological Mapping, and Chitirala and junior Fiorella Gargiulo finishing ninth in Wind Power.