A Niverville teenager has emerged as the top geography student in Manitoba. And the title of national champ could be hers by Monday.

Grade ten student Rhyanne Pauls beat out hundreds of other students from the province in the Canadian Geographic Challenge. She is now one of twenty students flown to Ottawa to compete in the national championship this weekend.

(Rhyanne doing field work at the Britannia Conservation Area.)Pat Fast is a Guidance Counsellor at Niverville Collegiate Institute. He says for more than ten years now he has been encouraging students to enter this contest. Pauls is not one of his students but Fast was told by another student to try and encourage her to enter.

"I kind of went and asked her and convinced her to try it," recalls Fast. "The rest is history, it's amazing."

Pauls beat out hundreds of other students from this province in an online multiple choice test. Students have thirty seconds to answer each question and the Niverville teen ended up with the highest mark in Manitoba.

According to Fast, Pauls is the third student from NCI to qualify for nationals. However, she is the first NCI student to ever win at the provincial level.

"It's really neat," he says. "I was thinking maybe this would be the last year that I would do that but no this is a lot of inspiration for me to maybe keep digging."

Pauls is now in Ottawa with 19 other students from across our country. According to organizers, the students will undergo two intense days of written testing and fieldwork, designed to assess their geographical prowess. At the end, five finalists will emerge. In the last round of the Challenge, they will answer fast-paced geography-related trivia questions. Set up like a game show, the Challenge will be hosted by Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques at the Canadian War Museum.

Fast says Pauls is a wonderful student and whatever career path she chooses, whether geography related or not, she will succeed.

This year more than 650 schools and more than 22,000 students participated.

* Photo credit: Matt Zambonin/ Canadian Geographic

(The 20 contestants with the Canadian Space Agency astronaut and Challenge moderator, David Saint Jacques. Rhyanne standing next to astronaut.)