Spelling champ from Austin wins national geography contest
WASHINGTON — Nihar Janga, an eighth-grader from Austin with an already impressive array of awards, took home top honors Wednesday in the 31st annual National Geographic GeoBee, an elite test of geographic knowledge.
Janga, who attends Canyon Ridge Middle School in the Leander school district, triumphed over 53 other state GeoBee champions during a competition at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington.
This is not Janga’s first championship. He was also a co-champion of the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee and a top-10 finalist in the 2018 GeoBee.
The society also held the first-ever national-level competition of the Geo-Challenge, a team competition that asked for innovative solutions to modern problems. This year’s challenge: plastic pollution in our waterways. A team from Flushing Christian School in Flushing, N.Y., won by building a model filtration device to clear plastic debris from the Hudson River.
The winning team will receive $25,000 plus support to implement their project. Janga will receive a $25,000 college scholarship, a lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society and an expedition to the Galapagos Islands aboard the National Geographic Endeavour ll.
The National Geographic GeoBee is a competition for public schools, private schools, and homeschools in the United States and its territories, as well as the Department of Defense Dependents Schools.