The Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) team competed early March in the annual Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science (TEAMS) competition at the Wheaton IIT Rice campus.

Central brought 32 competitors, divided into three varsity teams and one jv team, to compete against other schools in solving modern scientific problems.

Smriti Kanangat, sophomore and member of the jv team, said they were “presented with various scenarios, this year all pertaining to biomedical engineering, a couple weeks before the competition. We did some background research before we came, and during the actual competition we answered multiple choice and essay questions.”

The topics covered at this competition included engineering and exploring artificial heart valves, hip and knee prostheses, disease-targeting drugs, dental implants, anatomical fluid and heat transfer, clinical data, and clinical trials.

The team members spent most of their day at the competition. “We had to get to school at 7:30 am and we didn’t get back until 2:00 pm,” Kanangat said.

Neither the varsity team nor the jv team placed in the multiple choice competition, but the scores for the essays have yet to be processed. The questions were very challenging,” Kanangat said.  “We had to use our research combined with our own knowledge, so we responded to the scenarios as best we could. It was a good learning experience, and it enabled us to be more prepared if we are ever confronted with problems like this in the real world.”