Competing against 18 highly-rated schools from Nassau and Suffolk Counties, a team of five Valley Stream Central High School science students came home with a second place trophy in one of the five events at the challenging 19th annual Physics Olympics at SUNY Stony Brook on March 24.

The team was composed of Phil Chan, Tom Cook, Camile Gooden, Danielle Summers and Michele Tedesco, all members of Dennis Treubig's Advanced Placement Physics class.

"It was a good preparation for the AP Physics exam in May," said Danielle. "We also enjoyed meeting the other schools' teams and touring the Stony Brook campus."

The event that the Central High School team took second place in was titled "Back to Fundamentals." It involved determining, in three or four minutes each, the value of five "fundamental" quantities regarding mass, length, volume, time and frequency. For example, students had to determine the volume of liquid in cubic centimeters inside a cylinder with no markings on it, and determine the frequency of a tuning fork by pitch.

The other four events were: a Physics Bowl, which is a fast-paced question-and-answer quiz show with four teams playing; Fermi Questions, which requires students to estimate quantities that are impossible to measure directly, such as the number of drops of water in the Long Island Sound; Paper Airplanes, which involves constructing a paper airplane that flies the farthest but lands the closest to a center line; and Hooke's Law, which involves determining the spring constant (k) or strength of a large garage door-type spring.