GALWAY — A group of Galway High School students is in the top 20 of a national science contest with an entry that was “thrown together in an hour,” according to one of the contestants.

Eleventh-grader Maxwell Morgan said his science teacher, Paul Levin, told him about the PBS contest connected to the television show “WIRED Science” just a few days before the contest deadline.

“[Classmate] Kevin Miller and I fooled around thinking about it, we got some sample music off a disc and threw the video together in about an hour the day it was due,” Morgan said.

The resulting nearly eight-minute video, entitled, “Density,” features several students conducting experiments with liquids and gases.

Morgan said the students tried to have fun with their entry and they didn’t think it would score very well with the judges.

“We were shocked to make the top 20,” he said.

The competition was open to high school students, and semifinalist entries included videos about the Big Bang Theory, pressure, superconductivity and safety in the science lab, among other topics.

All of the videos can be seen on the Web site, www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience.

Morgan said he’s looking forward to May 19 when the top three videos are announced.

According to the Web site: “The videos were selected by our panel of judges from a large pool of terrific submissions. Although a majority of submissions clearly illustrated scientific principles in an original and creative fashion, these 20 went above and beyond in making science more interesting and relevant for high school students.”

The semifinalists will receive subscriptions to “WIRED” magazine, and the science departments of each of their schools will receive $100 plus a subscription to the magazine.

Levin said Morgan is the morning announcer on the school district’s closed-circuit television system.

Levin has been the high school science department head for nearly a year and has been teaching in the district for 10 years.

“There are a lot of contests available to students and we compete often, but this is the first national level science contest we’ve done,” Levin said of the PBS competition. “I approached Max and we shared some ideas of what they might be able to do, and then [the students] ran with it.”

He said the major cost for preparing the video was the time the students spent on it.

Morgan said he and his fellow students had a good time and when they were done with the project, they uploaded the entry with their school information.

“I’m so excited we made the top 20,” Morgan said. “It’s something I can put on my college applications.”