While most students are winding down their studies in anticipation of summer vacation, a special group of students at Lincoln Middle School is actually spending more time hitting the books.

Five Lincoln students are headed for the National Middle School Science Bowl in Golden, Colorado in late June after winning the regional competition for Florida and Georgia. The national bowl, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors, will pit the top 31 teams from throughout the country against each other in both a ‘Jeopardy’-style academic competition and a model car race.

Lincoln team members include 7th-graders Rachel Keen and Matt Banks and 8^th-graders Alexander Sappington, Bryan Li and Hohyun Jeon. With the support of their coaches, science teachers Adrienne Thieke and Roberta Harbrucker, the students prepared for the regional competition all year, participating in after-school practice sessions each week and doing private research and study  on their own. Thieke says that kind of commitment is what got the team to the national competition.

“They learn everything we teach them, but they’re also learning beyond the classroom,” she said. “It was their interest in science and their desire to do even more that got them to this point.”

“I’ve been interested in science since I was five or six,” said Keen. “I’m really interested in earth and space science, and this competition is a way for me to express myself.”

Team members say they enjoy spending time with peers who have a similar interest in science.

“I’m learning a lot from being on this team,” said Li. “The team members are very unique, and I’ve made good friends.”

Teamwork is critical in both the regional and national competitions. Because the academic competition covers a wide range of topics, each student must focus on a specific area of interest, such as life science, physical science, even math. The students work together to answer questions and must defer to the ‘expert’ on their team when appropriate, which means they have to be willing to check their egos at the door. Thieke says the Lincoln team has done just that.

“We stress that it’s not about what you know as one person, it’s about how you work as a team, and they’ve done that,” she said. “They’re all distinctly strong personalities, and yet they just seem to merge together.”

Until they leave on their all-expenses paid trip to Colorado, the students will continue to prep for the national competition. That means more studying at home, more practicing with their buzzer system and the design and construction of a model hydrogen fuel cell car for the race portion of the National Science Bowl. Sappington says he and his teammates are looking forward to going up against the best science students in the country.

“We’re really excited,” he said. “It’s going to be a tough competition because all the teams will be super good, but we’ll do our best.”