For the first time in over five years, the Los Altos High School's Science Olympiad team competed in the Santa Clara County Regionals. The team gathered at Milpitas High School on Saturday, March 15, going head-to-head with multiple high school teams in the Bay Area.

The team, consisting of 15 students, had two members for each event — varying from Robot Tours to Geologic Mapping. Starting preparations in January, the team met 5 hours a week to perfect their machines.

Their hard work led to the team landing multiple top 10 placements in build events, including 4th in Air Trajectory and 8th in Robot Tour.

"It was just a lot of dedication," freshman Jay Roy said. "Especially in build events, hard work is the biggest factor to success. You can't fake effort."

The Air Trajectory event required the members to design a device which would launch a projectile. They decided to build a long vertical tube in which they would drop a compact mass, compressing the air and launching the projectile a certain distance.

"It's not really about how smart you are, but how dedicated the team is," sophomore team captain Matthew Kim said. "We noticed the teams that put a lot of effort in. It shows."

It was that same dedication that carried the team's success over to the Robot Tour. The team had to program and engineer a robot to navigate a course autonomously.

"More experienced teams have more time to create really detailed note sheets for test events and more time to study," Jay said. "But they continually rotate the build events so people can't just reuse builds every single time, which really gave us a leg up as a beginner team."

Looking forward, the team has several goals they want to achieve before their next competition.

"One goal I have is to do more team building," Matthew said. "This year, most of our meetings were virtual. But at the competition, I enjoyed talking to everybody, even people from other teams. I think we should do more of that within our own team."

The team also plans to prepare earlier to improve their performance in test events.

"A lot of people started studying only a week before," Jay said. "We definitely need to have more committed team members that are gonna actually study for test events much sooner on."

Beyond competition preparation, the team also has a mentorship program where they teach middle school students the basic skills of Science Olympiad, including at local schools like Bullis Charter School, Egan Junior High School, and Blach Intermediate School.

They also plan to host a Division-B mentorship program, inviting middle school teams to gain experience.

"There have been a few challenges so far in navigating the process," sophomore Joyce Yang said. "But I'm sure that the team will do great next year."

If interested in joining the team, visit their website lahsscioly.org for more information.