JACKSON TWP — Several Seneca Valley students recently won prestigious championship titles in the National Academic Games competition in West Virginia.

The Academic Games is a competition in which students from schools in eight states try to out-think each other in areas of mathematics, language arts and social studies. Students compete as teams and as individuals.

To get to the national competition in Wheeling, these students first had to successfully compete in several regional competitions.

The national competition had four age categories — senior, junior, middle and elementary.

Alex Garcia, a sixth grader at Haine Middle School in Cranberry, won a national championship in the On-Sets Individual category. That category features a board and cube game that teaches students about logic and mathematics.

Ryan Stelitano, also a sixth grader at Haine Middle School, won a national championship in the Equations Individual category.

That category also involves mathematics and is played with 24 cubes, each of which is labeled with different sets of numbers and mathematical equations.

Additionally, Lucy Geronime, a seventh grader at the Seneca Valley Middle School, took fourth place in the propaganda category.

That category involves linguistic equations and persuasion techniques.

As a team, five students from Haine Middle School took third place in the On-Sets category.

Those students were Dmitri Zalnasky, Andrew Funovits, Sarah Donaldson, Alex Garcia and Ryan Stelitano.

Teachers Dale Wagner, Ruth Johns, Lynne Ranayhossaini and Jeremiah Friday all served as advisers for the teams.