MIT Science Bowl turns ten
Seventh annual high school invitational draws 48 teams from across the country
When the MIT Science Bowl Club was founded in 2015, the Middle School Regional competition that they hosted was the first fully student-run National Science Bowl tournament. Teams of middle schoolers gathered at MIT to play rounds of fast-paced science trivia and potentially win a free trip to Washington D.C. for the National Finals. Four years later, the club hosted one of the first-ever invitational Science Bowl tournaments — unofficial tournaments that are run by students in preparation for the official Regional and National Science Bowl competitions. While MIT remains the only student-run Regional host today, recent years have seen an explosion of invitational tournaments, from in-person competitions hosted by other universities to fully online tournaments organized by high schoolers. MIT continues to be at the forefront of these tournaments’ operation, even as the network of passionate Science Bowl alumni grows around the country.
By students, for students
The first Science Bowl competition at MIT was directed in 2016 by Kathleen Schwind MCP ’19, who wanted to create a space to “celebrate others who weren’t celebrated before” and give a chance for local students to compete at a Regional competition. Schwind had founded the California Central Coast Regional two years prior, so when her friends Kevin Sutherland PhD ’19, Angela Xi, and Songela Chen ’19 discovered that Massachusetts lacked a Middle School Regional, Schwind was a natural choice for the role of director. As for assembling a staff team, there were already many interested students at MIT — a school that attracts a large fraction of the thousands of Science Bowl competitors every year. When Schwind and her friends walked down the Infinite, they “tracked down anyone with a Science Bowl shirt” and asked if they would like to join the staff team, Schwind recalls. Through these efforts, MIT Science Bowl became both fully student-run and a way for alumni to stay connected with the communities they found in middle and high school.
When Schwind graduated, directorial leadership of MIT Science Bowl passed down to Phi Adajar ’27 PhD, a Science Bowl alumnus who founded a team at their high school. Adajar and their executive team knew that the 2019-2020 school year would present new difficulties, as with any transition period. Having had experience as chair of MIT’s Educational Studies Program (ESP), Adajar was well acquainted with the process of reserving rooms and managing large-scale events, but the introduction of buzzers and other variables in the mix would be a challenge. As luck would have it, the National Science Bowl had just announced a pilot program that year in which unreleased Regional questions could be given to groups looking to run their own tournaments. Realizing that this program could be an opportunity for the new executive team to practice before the official Regional competition, Adajar requested a set, and the MIT Science Bowl Invitational was born.
When the world shut down due to COVID-19 restrictions a few weeks later, the team was faced with an even larger question. At its core, Science Bowl is a head-to-head and face-to-face competition, yet in-person matches are impossible in lockdown conditions. As weeks turned to months, Adajar and their team started planning for a possible online tournament, reaching out to the creator of an online buzzing system. In an effort spearheaded by Joshua Park ’22, the team recruited volunteers to write a custom question set for the 2020 tournament, starting a tradition of student-written questions for student-run tournaments.
Today, the Middle School Regional competition is still going strong, and the most recent high school invitational was larger than ever, featuring 48 teams from 21 states. Per registration data, about half the teams lived within driving range, while the other half traveled from as far away as California and Washington. The writing team now has around 30 people from MIT and other universities, who write a total of over 1,000 draft questions every year.
Both Adajar and Schwind are incredibly proud of how much the organization has grown. For Adajar, this growth is the goal of the tournament in the first place, to “let [students] have fun with [STEM] and…see where it goes.”
For Schwind, the size of today’s MIT Science Bowl “blows [her] mind,” and she loves hearing stories of generations of alumni coming back.
A new generation
For current MIT Science Bowl directors Gideon Tzafriri ’26 and Anurag Sodhi ’28, their continued involvement with Science Bowl in college was a no-brainer. Both Tzafriri and Sodhi began competing in middle school and stuck with the activity throughout high school, ultimately becoming captains of their respective teams and placing highly at the National tournament. Likewise, both have a personal connection to MIT Science Bowl, having competed at the Invitational for multiple years in high school. For Tzafriri, a Boston-area local, getting involved with MIT Science Bowl’s leadership was also a full-circle moment — ten years ago, he was one of those middle schoolers competing at MIT’s first Regional tournament.
Tzafriri and Sodhi are also the first set of MIT Science Bowl directors to have competed in the post-pandemic Science Bowl landscape. Over the pandemic, one way that the Science Bowl community survived was via large online invitationals inspired by MIT’s tournament that were organized by high schoolers on Discord, a popular instant messaging and voice call app. Tzafriri and Sodhi ran some of those very first Discord tournaments. By the time they graduated high school, this style of tournament had become so popular that there was often an online invitational tournament every few weeks during the school year outside of Regionals season. Tzafriri, now familiar with these larger field sizes and greater opportunities to practice, has been attempting to “expand the [MIT Invitational] competition” from 36 teams to 48 teams and increase the number of teams who qualify for the double-elimination playoff tournament from the morning round-robin competition. Of course, this has not been without its challenges. Even though MIT Science Bowl has what Sodhi describes as “the things that most [high schooler-run] Science Bowl tournaments just fight to reach” — a large potential staff pool, a large potential writer pool, brand recognition — an expanded tournament still means more rooms to reserve, more tasks to juggle, and more questions to write. However, this challenge is exactly why Tzafriri and Sodhi continue to be involved in Science Bowl — it’s just “the natural thing” to do, said Tzafriri.
Looking back at his time in high school, Sodhi considers his experience competing in MIT Science Bowl some of “the most fun [he’s] ever had.” One of his main objectives is to nourish that sense of fun for both current competitors and other alumni alike, ensuring that the Regional and Invitational “get better and better every year.”
In September, MIT virtually hosted the first ever collegiate Science Bowl tournament, a chance for graduated players to return and play some rounds with old friends. The tournament used a draft question set that would later become this year’s Invitational. For Tzafriri and Sodhi, this small tournament was a way to get feedback on questions and ensure that the content adheres to strict quality control standards, which MIT Invitational has come to be known for.
The people behind the curtain
While the directors are the primary shapers of the organization’s direction, MIT Science Bowl’s accomplishments would be impossible without the rest of the staff. Like this year’s directors, many of the volunteers are also Science Bowl alumni, drawn to MIT’s tournament as a chance to reunite with old friends and give back to the community. Before the opening ceremony, over a hundred volunteers shuffled into the headquarters to check in, grab supplies, coordinate the lunchtime delivery of 200 pizzas, and catch up with old friends. Some traveled from out of state. Many stayed up late the previous night to make sure every detail was accounted for: the executive officer team and writing leads self-reported an average of under four hours of sleep per person.
Once everyone found their room assignments, the remaining volunteers on standby pulled up scoring spreadsheets so they could follow along with the action, keep an eye on their old school’s teams, and speculate on the winners of the tournament. Conversation during the lunch break was filled with highlights from the morning: dominant teams posting victory margins of more than 200 points; one player’s calculations burning through a notebook’s worth of scratch paper in a single game; two teams near-perfectly splitting the maximum amount of points achievable.
This camaraderie is what has enabled MIT Science Bowl to persist and grow for as long as it has. At MIT, Science Bowl is more than a tournament — it’s a place for friends to come back to year after year.