Two Saratoga boys won top honors at the inaugural Math Wizards Competition hosted by the India Community Center of Milpitas.

Aaron Garg, a seventh-grader at Redwood Middle School in Saratoga, was first, and Archit Sheth-Shah, a seventh-grader at Miller Middle School in San Jose, was second in the sixth- through eighth-grade category at the competition.

The event was hosted at the ICC on Nov. 22.

The ICC is the largest nonprofit organization in the United States that aims at promoting the Indian culture and values.

For more information, visit www.indiacc.org.

Harker students are qualifiers

Harker School seniors Karan Lodha, Vivek Saraswat and Albert Wu—all of Saratoga—have qualified as semifinalists in the 2004 National Merit Scholarship Competition and are among 35 Harker seniors who earned this distinction this year.

The semifinalists were selected from a pool of 1.3 million entrants, and 16,000 youth nationwide earned this honor. Of Harker's senior class, 58 percent received National Merit recognition, with 26 percent being named semifinalists.

The qualifications are based on scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, in verbal, math and writing skills.

Redwood robotics qualifies for state

Two Redwood Middle School robotics teams participated in the first Lego league regional competition on Nov. 16 in Milpitas.

In September, all the teams were given the same detailed mission to solve.

At the competition, they ran their programmed robots to complete those missions during a series of time trials.

The eighth-grade team scored high enough to qualify to attend the state championship in December. And the sixth-/seventh-grade team also had a great performance, winning second place in the single-elimination playoff round.