Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 22, 1993                   TAG: 9305220146
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: New River Valley bureau
DATELINE: DUBLIN                                LENGTH: Medium

GOVERNOR'S SCHOOL WINS COMPETITION

"It's incredible to win a national first . . . That's the first one I've ever seen," said Robert Carlson, assistant director and physics teacher at the school. "And they won it by a substantial margin."

The 605 score was 25 percent higher than the second-highest scorer in the nation in the division.

The students on the team were Jeffery Caudell and Tristan Mackey, both from Carroll County High School; Aaron Mumaw, Floyd County High School; Brian Weaver, Narrows High School, and Diane Owens, Emery Conrad, Brooks Moses and Phuong Lui, Pulaski County High School.

Students from Southwest Virginia commute to the Governor's School for a half-day of classes each day, and spend the other half-day in their home schools. The Governor's School is on the Pulaski County High School campus.

The 1993 Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science (TEAMS) sponsored by the Junior Engineering Technical Society has four divisions for invitational schools like the Governor's School and four for schools with open-door admissions policies.

The four divisions in each category are based on school size. Since the Southwest Virginia Governor's School is small, currently with 69 students, Carlson said it is likely that every state had a school competing in its division.

The Governor's School was in the top five scores in the nation, regardless of division.

Test sites for Virginia schools in the TEAMS competition were Old Dominion University, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and Virginia Tech, where the Southwest Virginia Governor's School competed last month.

The team had to win regional and state division competition to qualify for testing on the national level.

TEAMS competition tests not only the knowledge of the students but their ability to apply it as a team, Carlson said. Each team can have up to eight students, who break up into groups and work on different pages of the TEAMS tests but must agree on their answers to each problem.

Carlson said this reflects real-world engineering of today where the team approach is used. "They model this on the way engineers work in industry," he said.

Public and private schools can field teams starting in at regional levels in this competition, but not all of them do. "But we kind of look at things like this as an extension of our curriculum," said Margaret Duncan, Governor's School director.

The school is the newest in Virginia, now completing its third year.

Last year it won a third place in the national TEAMS competition. Duncan mounted the TEAMS certificate on a wall in the school's office along with other awards students have landed for the school, but optimistically left an empty space above it because she thought this year's TEAMS participants would bring back another certificate.

She may not have been optimistic enough. A first-place certificate is larger and may not fit in the wall space that was preserved.