STUDENTS HEAD TO SCIENCE BOWL NOHO TEAM HOPES TO UNSEAT LONG-RUNNING CHAMPION.

Byline: LISA M. SODDERS Staff Writer

NORTH HOLLYWOOD - As a child with an insatiable curiosity, Tim Hsieh dismantled a yo-yo when he was 4 and a disposable camera two years later, just to see how they worked.

The yo-yo "wasn't very exciting," recalled Hsieh, now a North Hollywood High School senior. "And I got shocked by the capacitors when I took apart the camera. After a while, I just played it safe with Legos."

But his passion for learning about how the world works remained, and now Hsieh and four other members of the school's Science Bowl team will head to Washington, D.C., for the 16th annual U.S. Department of Energy National Science Bowl.

"Science is beautiful," said team member Joseph Chang, 17, of Granada Hills. "It makes the Earth more familiar, because you know what's going

on."

The team members - Hsieh and Chang, along with Alexander Yen, 18, of Northridge; Denise Ye, 17, of Northridge; and John Chen, 17, of Woodland Hills - will compete against 67 other regional champs on their knowledge of calculus, chemistry, physics, biology, earth science, astronomy, computer science, geology and trigonometry.

North Hollywood won eight of the past nine regional competitions, and went on to win the nationals in 2001.

Since then, Thomas Jefferson High School of Alexandria, Va., has won the national title and is the team NoHo hopes to beat this year. The first- and second-place teams will win a science research trip to a DOE site and a trip to France.

NoHo coach Rishita Shah, who also teaches Advanced Placement chemistry and biology, thinks this year's team has a good chance.

"They work so well with each other," Shah said. "It's been a pleasure being able to work with them."

Like the U.S. Academic Decathlon, another event at which LAUSD schools excel, the Science Bowl requires hours of studying.

But the decathlon's 10 subjects cover the humanities while the Science Bowl is focused on math and science, and there is no study guide for it. The students pore over textbooks on their own, covering some subjects - such as earth science - that aren't even touched on in their regular classes.

"Science Bowl lets you follow your own passions," said Chang.

Science Bowl students are read the question out loud by a moderator, then vie against another team to see who can hit a buzzer first to win the chance to answer the question, much like the game show "Jeopardy!"

Yen said all five are strong in mathematics, but Hsieh's specialty is physics, Ye's is biology, and Yen's is chemistry - "I was drawn by watching stuff explode."

Ye, who's considering a career in medicine, said she's found herself procrastinating on her regular schoolwork by studying for the Science Bowl - reading a biology textbook for the third time or following an endless chain of Web page links while looking up articles on the Internet.

But no matter what the outcome during the contest that will begin next Thursday, the many hours of study have already paid off for the students, most of whom are headed to college next fall: Hsieh and Ye to Harvard; Yen to Wharton; and Chang to Pomona College.

lisa.sodders(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

From left to right, starting in the back, are North Hollywood High School Science Bowl team members Tim Hsieh, B-team member Andrew David, John Chen, team captain Alex Yen, Denise Ye, Joseph Chang and coach Rishita Shah.

John Lazar/Staff Photographer