A student delegation from Shenzhen Middle School defeated six teams to win this year’s U.S. Invitational Young Physicists Tournament (USIYPT), according to the Daily Sunshine.

Shenzhen Middle School is the first high school from China to win the internationally recognized tournament.

The USIYPT is a round-robin tournament between schools debating their proposed solutions to the tournament’s research problems. The annual tournament publishes research problems a year before the tournament and participating teams have one year to find solutions by conducting research and doing experiments.

This year’s tournament was held at the Harker School in San Jose, California on February 1 and 2. During the two-day competition, seven teams debated their solutions and dozens of physics experts evaluated each team based on its performance.

The participating teams included four U.S. schools, two Chinese schools and one school from Tunisia.

Qiao Bixing, a contestant of Shenzhen Middle School, said he and his teammates spent all their spare time at the lab preparing for the tournament in the past year.

With the annual college entrance examinations still about four months away, 19 students from Shenzhen Middle School have been pre-admitted to Peking University and Tsinghua University, two of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, according to the newspaper.(Zhang Yang)