On Thursday, Jan. 15 Cherry Hill East’s Science Olympiad Team One placed first in the Camden County Regional Science Olympiad tournament at Camden County College in Blackwood, NJ. East Team One and Team Two took first and twelfth place respectively in Division C, which represented a total of 25 teams.

Although the two teams technically competed separately, the best performing members of each team will participate in the state competition as one combined team, since East can only send one team to the next level of competitions.

Peter Zhang (’15) and Jake Walsh (’16) of Team One took first place in Astronomy. Additionally, Team One members Madlyn Kates (’16) and Hannah Chen (’15) took second place in Forensics, and Raj Patel (’16) and Miku Fujita (’16) took second place in an event entitled It’s About Time, in which they answered test questions regarding time in addition to building a non-electrical instrument that could measure time intervals. All Team One competitors performed extremely well in the competition with each event placing within the top ten.

Team Two placed among the top five in two events. Kaitlyn Boyle (‘17) and Elizabeth Qian (’17) placed first in Write it Do it, an event that required one teammate to write a description of a structure and the other to replicate it using only the first person’s instructions. Additionally, Eric Kim (’17), Ben Vaupen (’17) and Jonathan Lee (’16) placed third in Experimental Design, an event in which the team members wrote their own lab report for a titration experiment.

This is the first time East’s Science Olympiad team has won first place in three years, and the team is now preparing for States, which will be held at Middlesex County College in Edison, NJ on March 10. The strongest members of both teams will be called to participate in States, and will then begin preparing for competitions, with high hopes of defending their first place performance.