Blair Magnet News: Winter 2018
Blair seniors were recently recognized for their extraordinary research:
Siemens Competition: Senior Andrew Komo was the individual winner of the 2017 Siemens Competition, winning a $100,000 scholarship for his project entitled, "Cryptographically Secure Proxy Bidding in Ascending Clock Auctions" (siemensusa). Andrew and Robert Yang were both regional finalists.
Regeneron Science Talent Search Finalists: Seniors Sarah Gao, Andrew Komo, David Wu, and Alice Zhang were named finalists in the 2018 Regeneron Science Talent Search (societyforscience). Blair's four finalists are the most of any school in the nation this year, and it pushes the total number of Science Talent Search finalists in the history of the Blair Magnet to 50. No other school has had more finalists since 1989. Each of these students will be awarded a $25,000 scholarship, with an opportunity to win awards up to $250,000 in March. Their projects will be on display to the public on March 11th at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. The top winners will be announced at a black-tie gala at the National Building Museum on March 13th.
Regeneron Science Talent Search Semifinalists: In addition to the four finalists, seniors Kevin Jiang, Uro Lyi, Anish Senapati, Arman Siddique, Shriyash Upadhyay, Katherine Wu, and Ariel Zhang were also named semifinalists in the 2018 Regeneron Science Talent Search (societyforscience). Each of these students received a $2,000 prize, and $2,000 was also awarded to Blair for each semifinalist, totaling $22,000.
Many other students won competitions in the fall semester:
The Ocean Science Bowl Team won the 2018 Chesapeake Bay Bowl and will compete at the National Ocean Science Bowl in April. The team is coached by Mr. Pham with students Anish Senapati, Laura Cui, Elliott Kienzle, Noah Singer, and David Wu (@MrPham_at_MBHS). The B team also won third place (@MrPham_at_MBHS).
The Quiz Bowl team won the 2017 Centennial Invitational, with the A team (Anson Berns, Katherine Lei, Ben Miller, and Ian Rackow) finishing first and the B team (Haydn Gwyn, Matthew Shu, Sophia Weng, and David Witten) finishing third.
The Cybersecurity Team won the NYU Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) High School Forensics Competition, with Team b1c (Kevin Higgs, George Klees, and Noah Singer) taking first place and Team n0de (Ian Rackow, William Wang, and Daniel Zhu) finishing in third place (@blairmagnet).
The Math Team (MoCoSwaggaSquad) won first place at the 2017 Princeton University Mathematics Competition (2017 Division A Team Results), with Jacob Stavrianos and Kevin Qian scoring in the top 30 (2017 Individual Results) (@lsgwyn).
The Math Team (MoCoSwaggaSquad) won second place at the 2018 Carnegie Mellon Informatics and Mathematics Competition (CMIMC) (@lsgwyn).
For the second straight year, senior Dilhan Salgado won the University of Maryland Mathematics Competition. Kevin Qian finished in third place, and seventeen other Blair students earned honorable mention: Guangqi Cui, Olivia Fan, David Fang, Haydn Gwyn, Leo He, Elliot Kienzle, Timothy Qian, Steven Qu, Jyotsna Rao, Jackson Raynolds, Anish Senapati, Yuang Shen, Noah Singer, Siddhartha Taneja, David Wu, Ambrose Yang, and Kevin Zhou.
William Wang and Kevin Higgs won the 2017 Congressional App Challenge for Maryland's 8th District for their app, Keyster. Jason Maa was a runner-up for his app, Chattering With Me.
Blair's team won the 2018 Baltimore Rubik's Cube Challenge (@MrPham_at_MBHS)
Magnet students and teachers organized and participated in events this fall that were supported by the Magnet Foundation:
The Puzzle Lords went to the 2017 NCSSS Professional Conference to share the successes and challenges of PuzzlePalooza (@davidstein65).
A group of students organized Blair's first Hackathon in December (@blair_hacks).
The Robotics Team started the 2018 build season with a new CNC router (YouTube).