The 5th MA regional educational contests of the North South Foundation were held on April 9th and 10th 2005 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge.  This event was co-sponsored by ATFS Learning Center, American Express Financial Services and MIT Sangam.  Over 360 contestants registered for Spelling, Vocabulary, Math, Geography and Essay Writing contests, combined.

This year NSF had introduced two new contests - Geography Bee and Essay Writing - in response to the requests of parents and the need to provide incentives for children to excel in these areas. 

On Saturday, the contests began at 8:45 am with the Essay Writing Bee, which involved 38 children from grades 3 –12.  Children in grades 3-5 were grouped together as Junior Bees; those in grades 6-8 were Intermediate Bees and the high schoolers were called Senior Bees.  They were given the topic of the essay just 10 minutes before 9 o’clock and had one hour to write an essay of 1000 words or less.  Five judges – four of them college professors – then sat down and scored the essays and one of them commented that some essays were of better quality than written by his college-level students.  After a short 30-minute donut break, some of the students went right into Math Bee and competed along with others who had just come in for it.  Math competitions were the most popular with registration of over 130 children. After a lunch break, the vocabulary bee was conducted that saw 32 children in Junior and Senior groups.  The most challenging aspect of the math bee was for the organizers when the Level II group (grades 3-5) saw 16 children tied for the first place with the perfect score of 20 out of 20.  The organizers had not anticipated this kind of performance (and it did not happen in three other centers around the country where the same contest material was used) and they have scheduled a tie-breaker to be held on April 23. 

On Sunday, the morning contest was the newly introduced Geography Bee, composed of a written round of 30 questions and an oral round of five questions from various aspects of geography including physical geography, cultural geography, human geography, economic geography and Indian geography. 

On Sunday afternoon, approximately 110 children participated in the two levels of the spelling bee, the longest standing competition organized by NSF.  Junior Spelling Bee saw 70 children from ages 6-9 and the Senior group had 38 children ranging from 9 to 14. The competition was tough.  In the Junior category three children tied for the first place after the first two phases – a 20-word written phase followed by a 6-round oral phase.  The Senior group had one undisputed first place winner but two tied for the second place.  Ties were broken using written tie-breaker rounds and winners were declared by 4:30 pm. 

The Awards Ceremony followed the competition each day in which each participant was recognized for his/her achievement with a Certificate of Participation and a medal.  The top place finishers received additional Certificates of Excellence, and Gold, Silver or Bronze medals.  Professor Anil Saigal of Tufts University, the chief guest, gave a short but inspiring speech to the children about excelling in studies and the importance of scholarships such as those given by NSF that helps underprivileged children in India to attend college.  He then distributed the medals to the top-place finishers.  Gauri Chandna, president of the ATFS Learning Center gave away the certificates for Math Bee participants and also gave each winner a Math Workbook appropriate for his/her grade level. 

All children were also give a Dollar-A-Square pledge sheet and encouraged to participate in fundraising for merit-based scholarships provided by NSF for children in India.   NSF invites everyone to their 5th annual Educate India “FUN”draising walk to be held at Hopkinton State Park on Sunday, June 26th – mark your calendars!!

NSF would like to acknowledge the efforts of this year’s Regional Coordinator, Meledath Govindan; Math Bee Technical Coordinator, Gauri Chandna; Spelling Bee Technical Coordinator, Harris Thamby; Essay Writing Bee Technical Coordinator, Madhavi Nathan Oliver; Vocabulary Technical Coordinator, Balaguru Duraisamy; Geography Bee Coordinator, Vasanthi Nagareddi; Facilities Coordinator, Ashish Gupta of MIT-Sangam; and all the judges, pronouncers and the many volunteers who made this event possible.

The winners of the contests are listed in the table below:

Rank		Name	Grade	School*	Town*
JUNIOR VOCABULARY
1	Akshat Shekhar		5	Point Webster	Quincy
2	Abhinav Pandey		4	Hannah Elementary	Beverly
3	Aneesh Anand		4	Franklin Elementary	Franklin
SENIOR VOCABULARY
1	Rishi Singh		9	Dartmouth High	Dartmouth
2	Ramesh Govindan		8	Luther Burbank Middle	Lancaster
MATH BEE LEVEL 1
1	Rupayan Neogy		2	Merriam School	Foxboro
1	Nikhil Sreenivasan		1	Oak Meadow Montessori
1	Tajas Rao		1
1	Gowtham Manickam		1
MATH BEE LEVEL 3
1	Vishrut Gupta		8	RJ Grey Junior High	Acton
2	Saketh Kalathur		8	Oak Middle School	Shewsbury
3	Anisha Shenai		7
JUNIOR SPELLING BEE
1	Anshuman Das		2	Parker Elementary	Devens
2	Suryateja Rao		2	Miller School
3	Lasya Sreepada		2	Hannah Elementary	Peabody
SENIOR SPELLING BEE
1	Ramesh Govindan		8	Luther Burbank Middle	Lancaster
2	Amrita Mehta		8	RJ Grey Junior High	Acton
3	Shreya Divatia		8	Randolph Community Mid	Quincy
JUNIOR GEOGRAPHY BEE
1	Shyam Vasudevan		3	Bicentennial Elementary	Nashua
2	Rohit Rajiv		1	Rita Edward Miller
3	Vinay Reddy		1
SENIOR GEOGRAPHY
1	Neeraj Sirdeshmukh		7
2	Ramesh Govindan		8	Luther Burbank Middle	Lancaster
3	Rishikesh Rachevelpula		6
JUNIOR ESSAY WRITING
1	Kruti Vora		4
2	Nivedha Ram		4
3	Akshat Shekhar		5	Point Webster Middle	Quincy
Intermediate Essay Writing
1	Palak Walia		6
2	Amrita Mehta		8	RJ Grey Junior High	Acton
3	Haritha Pula		6	Doherty Middle	Worcester
Senior Essay Writing
1	Aditya Mahalingam-Dhingra		9

*The blanks under school and town indicate that the local organizers do not have that information.

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