Eighth-graders attending middle schools in Culver City and Placentia will begin competing in the 89th Scripps National Spelling Bee Tuesday in National Harbor, Maryland.
Cooper Komatsu, who attends Culver City Middle School, and Samuel Littrell, a student at Kraemer Middle School in Placentia, will be among the 285 spellers taking a 26-question multiple-choice spelling and vocabulary test.
The test administered at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center is considered the first round of the bee. The spellers will take to the convention center’s stage Wednesday to spell two words. Contestants correctly spelling the first word will advance to the third round.
Spellers correctly spelling their third-round word can be among the maximum of 50 spellers advancing to Thursday’s semifinals if their test score is high enough. A misspelling in either the second or third round means the contestant is eliminated.
Cooper qualified for the national bee on March 15 by winning the Los Angeles County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee for the second consecutive year. His final word was gudgeon, a noun meaning any of numerous spiny-finned fish, usually having a broad depressed head and large mouth and occurring chiefly in shallow costal waters.
Cooper reached the semifinals of last year’s national bee. He correctly spelled both of his semifinal words, but did not score high enough on two multiple-choice spelling and vocabulary tests to be among the 10 spellers to qualify for the championship finals
Cooper is 13 years old and teamed with Jem Burch to win the North American School Scrabble championship last month.
Cooper has studied Japanese since he was a kindergartener and likes how it connects him to his ancestors’ culture. He has a passion for geography, maps and discovering new places. Social studies and math are his favorite subjects.
Cooper is a member of his school’s cross country and robotics teams and a Boy Scout. He is a Los Angeles Clippers fan but says he also loves the Los Angeles Lakers. His maternal grandfather, Robert Rosenberg, competed in the 1955 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Samuel, 14, qualified for the national bee by winning the Orange County Spelling Bee on Feb. 27. His final word was cataclastic, an adjective referring to the process of deformation or metamorphism in which the grains of a rock are fractured and rotated.
Samuel also won the 2014 Orange County bee to qualify for the national bee, where he was eliminated in the third round when he misspelled viaticum, an allowance for traveling expenses.
Samuel loves to do anything with math, science or computers, both hardware and software. His dream is to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and study computer hardware engineering and physics.
Samuel has a love of math and competes in Mathcounts, with his team advancing to the state finals.
Samuel is also a swimmer, qualifying for Junior Olympics and plays violin in his school and church orchestras.
The bee is intended “to inspire children to improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives,” according to Paige Kimble, the bee’s executive director and 1981 champion.
The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below, with contestants ranging in age from 6 to 15 years old.
The field consists of students who won locally sponsored bees in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Department of Defense schools in Europe.
Six foreign nations are also represented — the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan and South Korea.
The second and third rounds will be shown by the broadband network ESPN3 from 5-8:45 a.m. and 10:15 a.m.-2:45 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time) Wednesday. The semifinalists will be announced at the conclusion of the third round.
The semifinals will be shown on ESPN2 from 7-10 a.m. Thursday and the finals from 5-7 p.m. Thursday on ESPN. The finals can also be seen on the WatchESPN app.
Throughout the competition, ESPN3 and WatchESPN will have a multiple- choice “Play-Along” version, where viewers will have a one-in-four chance to pick the correct spelling.
Informational boxes highlighting the word’s etymology, definition, pronunciation and part of speech, along with live tweets and the speller’s biography are also part of the “Play-Along” version.
What ESPN has dubbed as the “SpellCheck” feature has been added to the main feed, highlighting each individual letter as the speller spells the word. Correct letters will be highlighted in gold and the first letter the speller gets incorrect will be highlighted in red.
The winner will receive $40,000 from Scripps, which owns television stations, cable networks and newspapers; a $2,500 U.S. savings bond and complete reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster; and $400 in reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica and a three-year membership to Britannica Online Premium.
—City News Service