VAN NUYS : 24 Students Win Math/Science Prizes

Ben Young continued a family tradition Tuesday as he and fellow Van Nuys High School student Jennie Yoder captured the top prize at the 15th annual Rockwell International/Los Angeles Unified School District computer science competition.

Young and Yoder were among 24 students from the Math/Science magnet school to be honored at a banquet at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel, the largest number ever to be honored from a single school. Four students from three other schools made up the remaining finalists.

The event also marked the second time that a Young family member has won the grand prize--brother Ken took home the honor in 1991.

Virgilio Labrador, a spokesman for Rockwell, said the dominance of the competition by any one school was “very unusual.” The 28 finalists were selected from the district’s 121 junior and senior high schools.

“Van Nuys has been consistently well-represented in the past, but not this much,” Labrador said. “Usually it’s fairly well-represented over the school district. Van Nuys High School happens to be one of the best computer-science schools in the country.”

Eleven of the 15 projects entered in the competition were from the school, including Young and Yoder’s winning entry, “Computerized Artificial Environment: Sense and Respond (CAESaR)”, a model of a life-support system that could be used in a space station or planetary colony.

The project, which earned Yoder and Young a winner’s check for $2,000, employs sensors to monitor and respond to environmental hazards such as radiation, fire and toxicity in the atmosphere.

Van Nuys students also carried home two of the four $1,000 first prizes. Tenth-grader Michael Mazur and senior Jason Kassel won for their computer-aided video teleconferencing project and seniors Arkadiusz Wdowiak and Arthur Jerijian were honored with a first prize for their project, “Computer Language for Inexperienced Users”.

The remaining Van Nuys students won $500 second prizes. This included seniors Julie Rapaport, Mike Lei, Linda Falsafi-Haghighi, Bernard Yoo, Alexander Kuo, Michael Bateman, Brian Jennings, Damon Sokol, Tunc Yazici, Wayne Takura, Jaime Carrasco; juniors Vicky Nguyen, Kenneth Hsu, Amal Puswella, Jeff Chan, Paul Anand; and 10th-graders Matthew Faye and Brian Jennings.