Parkway West Students Win National TEAMS Competition

According to the , a team of eight students from  won first place in the academic competition. The district made the annoucement in a news release earlier this week.

According to the news release, the students placed first in the national Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science, or TEAMS, competition. The district stated that 107 teams from schools across the country participated in the event.

This is an annual high school competition where students use math and science skils in practical, creative ways to solve everyday engineering challenges, Parkway stated in the release.

The following students are members of the Parkway West team.

• Jaron Ma
• Caleb Ki
• Adam Manders
• Patrick Landwehr
• Andrew Kuehnle
• James Wang
• Kim Lister
• Ben Wheeler

See the following Parkway School District news release for more details on the competition.

The TEAMS program is an annual high school competition challenging students to work collaboratively and apply their math and science knowledge in practical, creative ways to solve real everyday engineering challenges. 

A team of eight students from Parkway West High School placed number one in the nation (out of 107 teams of same-size schools) in the TEAMS Competition -- Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science). 

The members of West High team are Jaron Ma, Caleb Ki, Adam Manders, Patrick Landwehr, Andrew Kuehnle, James Wang, Kim Lister and Ben Wheeler.  This team had previously ranked number one in the state for same-size schools, and number one regionally for schools of all sizes.  The TEAMS Competition co-sponsors are teachers Jan Keller and Ellen Wilke.

The TEAMS program is an annual high school competition challenging students to work collaboratively and apply their math and science knowledge in practical, creative ways to solve real everyday engineering challenges.  Focused on a theme each year, original academic and innovative concepts are developed for the competition based on the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges. Tackling these challenges requires critical job-readiness skills such as collaboration, analytical thinking, and multidimensional problem-solving.  In 2012, the competition covered the engineering involved in healthcare and medicine.

Working in a written competition format, teams of students faced off during two ninety-minute parts:

• Eighty multiple choice questions, requiring team members to apply math and science knowledge to novel situations.  
• Eight tasks to be answered in a short essay format, expanding students' ideas as they explain their ideas for engineering solutions.