By Rachel Becker

Teams compete together and as individuals in the competition.

Nerve-wracking pauses and shaking hands were part of the experience for Los Altos High School students competing in “Slac-O-Rama,” a Science Bowl sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Feb. 11 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Los Altos High rotated students from its “A” and “B” teams to compete aggressively, albeit unsuccessfully, with 25 other teams to answer individual toss-up questions and group bonus questions in biology, physics, chemistry, earth science and astronomy.

AP chemistry teacher Carl Babb, who had previously coached the nationally competitive Science Bowl team at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, founded the Science Bowl team at Los Altos High two years ago.

“I started the team because I had so much fun coaching it at Lynbrook, and I thought it would be something people here at Los Altos would enjoy,” Babb said.

He recruited students by pumping Stars Wars music over the intercom, announcing in a heavy Darth Vader voice, “Students - come out for Science Bowl.”

With a catchy advertising campaign, Babb attracted 10 students, enough to form two teams, an “A” team comprising seniors Larissa Zhou, Konstantin Dragomiretski and Jessica Perez, and juniors Lev Stefanovich and Lydia Pichahchi, and a “B” team with juniors Rachel Becker, Anna Lu, Qi Zhu, Charlie Leon and sophomore Michael Fagan.

“It’s challenging to get kids who love to play games,” Babb said. “On the one hand, it’s knowledge, but on the other, it’s gamesmanship. I don’t call it Science Bowl, I call it Science Jedis - and the reason for that is to make it light-hearted, and by the same token to give it an identity.”

The teams practice twice a week at lunchtime, balancing bagels and buzzers. The Los Altos team adopted a laidback approach, but they faced high schools with Science Bowl classes and rigorous training.

At the recent regional competition, the Los Altos team managed to best Irvington and Andrew P. Hill high schools before losing to Monta Vista High School and Harker School.

The cramped competition rooms alternated between silence and intense discussion as Los Altos students collaborated to answer bonus questions.

After a successful showing at the online Knowledge Bowl Open competition earlier in the year, during which the Los Altos team finished third in the state with top honors in the county, their finish at the regional Science Bowl was disappointing.

“I think that at these tournaments, an awful lot of it is the luck of who you’re up against in the first round,” Babb said. “We were up against Harker, who ended up winning, Los Gatos and Monta Vista, who were kind of tough. As a new team, our confidence got a little beat up. It was also the case that we were only able to enter one team, which kind of broke our confidence too.”

Science Bowl, however, like any competitive sport, is not all about winning.

“We’ll be a team again next year,” Babb said. “We’ll try to see if we can have some fun. A lot of Science Bowl is about having fun. And I hope Science Bowl does good things for the students who participate; I hope it opens doors for them with colleges, and I hope it opens doors for them with scholarships.”

Rachel Becker, a junior at Los Altos High School, joined the Science Bowl team last September.