Four Wilton high school students now know what it is like to be the best in the state.

Juniors Mike Gergoryk, Carisa Bergquist, Brandon Dusek and senior Casey Krush beat not only teams from Medina, Red River High School in Grand Forks and Park River in the Aerospace Industries Association Team America Rocketry Challenge, but from around the country. Out of about 900 teams, only 100 were chosen to compete at the national flyoff in Virginia on May 10.

Junior high and high school science teacher Mike Walz read an e-mail from Gov. John Hoeven challenging all North Dakota high schools to take part in the contest to his physics class of four within the first few days of school. The students were interested and decided to go ahead with it.

"It's always fun doing hands-on activities. We are getting more out of the class than just the book," the students said.

The rules of the contest were that teams design, build and test a model rocket that could fly up to 1,500 feet with two eggs as passengers, then return the eggs to earth, intact, via parachute. They used a flight simulation program to determine their rocket's success in varying conditions, then built two different designs. Trial and error was a factor throughout the process, as well as frustration and excitement.

"It took a lot of time to learn the program," Dusek said. "We thought it would be easy for the rocket to go up but there were some things we overlooked so it took four tries for a successful launch."

Tim Young, president of the North Dakota Rocketry Association, said going through the process Wilton did is the purpose of the competition.

"That's the whole idea - experimenting with rockets, testing them, to make them competitive. They moved slowly until they had something that worked … it's sort of like a real launch. If you don't have the stuff ready it's going to be a disaster," he said.

Walz said participating in the contest has been a real-life experience from the start. Each student wrote a letter to the school's administration asking for funding to build the rocket. Now that they are successful, they are looking for sponsors to send them to Virginia.

Gergoryk said that before the contest, he and his classmates were interested in design and learning how things work. And they're glad their hard work paid off. Scholarships will go to students on the top five teams, as well as the chance to attend NASA's space camp. At the competition, they will meet people involved in NASA and leaders of model rocket building.

"It's cool just to say we're going to the national competition," Gergoryk said. He hopes to participate in the contest next year also.

While the students didn't believe the news they were going to nationals at first, they aren't surprised. Their goal from the start was to launch a rocket to 1,000 feet. They made 1,350.

"We knew we had the capabilities to make it to nationals," Gergoryk said. And he thinks if they can launch to about 1,450 feet, they might win there, too. They will be cloning the first rocket for the national competition and are hoping the weather is better in Virginia than what they've been dealing with here.

"We're not going to try anything new. We'll just stick to what works."

(Reach reporter Angie Buckley at 250-8255 or angiebuckley@ndonline.com.)