Science Bowl is Back!

Science Bowl is a competition that PVS has been participating in for the past few years. Although it is a high school and middle school science knowledge competition, PVS only participates at the high school level. The event takes place around the last week of February, but no official date has been released yet.

Dr. Farhana Chowdhuryis the coach and trains her students well to prepare for this event. Last year, PVS had one team with five students, Naisha Chowdhury (22’), Ali Sultan Ali (22’), Zaid Hadidi (22’), Yasmeen Mannan (24’), and Amin Awad (24’). They made it to Top 20 /Elite 8???(check again with email and yaz).

This year, the members are Yasmeen Mannan (24’), Amin Awad (24’), Fayadh Chowdhury (25’), Sumaya Sultan Ali (25’), Farzan Quadri (26’), Mohammed Shala (26’), Mouhammed Sarr (26’), and Humza Siddiqui (26’).

Meetings are held on Tuesdays from 3:45 to 5:00 pm. Every year, a school can initially register one team but later if there are extra spots left, schools are allowed to register an additional team. Chowdhury hopes to be able to register two teams.

For the past two years, due to Covid, the event was virtual, which made it a bit easier on the students. As everything was held online, other teams couldn't make the team feel intimidated, which helped the students to stay calm while answering the questions.

This year, Chowdhury is focusing on making sure the team doesn’t lose too many points. Points are deducted for incorrectly-answered blurts, something she says the team is working on improving. Additionally, because the format of the answers are different, as they go by W, X, Y, and Z, instead of A, B, C, D, she hopes to make sure the new students become adjusted with that style.

Chowdhury says that Science Bowl is a “good opportunity for anybody who is fascinated by any kind of science competitions.” She explains that participating in this kind of competition allows students to broaden their horizons. “Once you study for different disciplines of science as a student, whoever loves science also kind of finds their passion; which path they want to go into.

“Somebody who might be really fascinated to always go to medical science might find that engineering is more fascinating or vice versa. So, the more you learn at this level, I think once they go to college, they have a better idea of which field or which major they want to go to.”