In some ways, 12-year-old Mihir Konkapaka is an old soul.

The Sabre Springs boy lists “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as a favorite movie. It came out in 1981. One of his favorite books is “The Phantom Tollbooth,” which was published in 1961.

And right now he’s getting ready for that most venerable of childhood brain games, the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Started in 1925, the bee begins May 30 in Washington, D.C., and will be broadcast nationally on television and streamed online, drawing millions of viewers who marvel at the prowess of the young spellers and smile at their unfiltered emotional reactions to success and failure.

This is Mihir’s second appearance in the nationals. He tied last year for 89th place, out of 229 contestants.

To prepare, he spends at least four hours every day studying. The walls of his bedroom are papered with handwritten pages of words he’s misspelled during practice.

Spelling bees seem at first glance to be marathons of memorization, but they’re more than that. The top competitors have also mastered letter patterns and word origins. They know Greek and Latin.

They’re puzzle-solvers, figuring out how to spell words the rest of us have never even heard by dissecting the various parts and putting them back together. All while standing in front of a crowd and TV cameras, armed with nothing but their wits.

Mihir Konkapaka smiles after correctly spelling the word “exsufflation” correctly in the championship round of the San Diego County Spelling Bee on March 9, 2023.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The challenge of doing all that is one of the reasons Mihir likes spelling bees. And underneath that passion is a methodical approach that belies the notion he’s an old soul.

He studies spelling using a computer program he wrote himself. Like other members of Gen Z (those born in 1997 or later), he’s a “digital native,” comfortable around computers. He taught himself how to code when he was 5 by checking out books from the library.

His generation is also used to lots of extracurricular activities. He takes classes in his family’s native tongue, Telugu, and swims. He tutors other kids in Python, a computer-programming language. When he isn’t playing video games — “Minecraft” is a favorite — he designs his own.

Mihir Konkapaka uses a computer program he wrote himself to practice.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Because of social media, this generation is also comfortable presenting themselves in public. Mihir has done YouTube videos about coding, wearing distinctive-colored glasses he picked out himself.

So “time management” is part of his vocabulary, and so is “goal setting.” But he’s still a kid.

Ask him about an imaginary perfect day, when he could choose what to do, he answers with one word: “Sleep.”

Getting up, he said, “is always just really annoying.”

Long line of triumphs

His first name translates into English as “the sun.” Mihir knows a thing or two about shining.

When he was 7, he won a national Inventor’s Challenge prize for a device called the “Checklistinator,” which offers reminders to kids on their way out the door on school mornings: “Do you have your binder? How ‘bout your Chromebook? Your lunch box?”

Mihir Konkapaka has several math medals hanging on his bedroom wall.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

He’s won awards in math, science, digital mapping and coding competitions. The city of San Diego named a day in his honor and gave him a proclamation that hangs on a wall in the family’s home, next to a certificate recognizing his participation in the national spelling bee.

Mihir got interested in spelling as a sixth-grader at the Connect Academy, a hybrid campus run by the Poway School District. He won the bee there in 2022 and moved on to the San Diego County Spelling Bee, where he topped about 60 other middle-schoolers.

This year, as a seventh-grader at Mesa Verde, he won again. (The county bee is organized by The San Diego Union-Tribune, in partnership with the county Office of Education.)

His success joins a long line of spelling triumphs by Indian American families, both locally and nationally. Spelling has been big in communities of South Asian descent ever since Balu Natarajan became the first child of immigrants to win the national bee in 1985.

There are regular community bees organized in various places, including San Diego, by the nonprofit North South Foundation and other groups. Older students pass along tips to younger ones.

Snigdha Nandipati, 14, of San Diego, right, and her brother Sujan Nandipati, hoist up her trophy after she won the National Spelling Bee by spelling the word “guetapens” in Oxon Hill, Md., on May 31, 2012.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

“The opportunities to practice and learn from other spellers were really helpful,” said Snigdha Nandipati, a San Diegan who won the Scripps National bee in 2012, when she was an eighth-grader at Francis Parker School.

It helped, too, that she absorbed a message from her parents’ example: “Put your heart and soul into everything you do.”

She went on to study at Yale University and is now in medical school at Virginia Tech. She said spelling bees helped instill in her a strong work ethic, an ability to absorb lots of information, and the focus needed to tune out distractions.

Last year, Nandipati wrote a book, “A Case of Culture,” about how people from different backgrounds navigate Western medicine. That, too, has roots in spelling bees, in the exposure she got to different languages that have shaped words in the English dictionary.

She had a signing event for the book at Warwick’s in La Jolla. Among those waiting to meet her: Mihir and his parents.

An American tradition

The San Diego County Spelling Bee’s final four — from left to right, Marcella Steele, Mihir Konkapaka, Kamryn Liu and Jedd Li — sit before being called to the stage to compete.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Every year, millions of elementary and middle-school students from across America compete in school spelling bees, the beginning step of a winnowing that ends with a couple hundred of them going to Washington for the multi-day national championship.

This has been going on for almost a century now, with interruptions during World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s become such a tradition now, ingrained in our culture,” said Corrie Loeffler, executive director of the national bee. “It’s something that feels very American.”

Part of the allure, she said, is its accessibility. Everybody uses words and has had to spell them. People watching at home can try to play along, and when the words get ridiculously hard, they can admire the kids’ abilities.

“It’s the wow factor, and just the inherent drama of whether someone will get the word right,” she said. “There’s just something very simple about a kid and a microphone.”

This year’s group of contestants includes 49 who, like Mihir, have been to the nationals before. (One boy, 13, is making his sixth appearance, a record.)

Mihir went out last year in the third round, tripped up by “antiphonal,” which refers to something played or sung by two groups in turn. He said he was nervous; the national bee was the first time he’d competed in person, before a live audience. His other contests had been virtual because of the pandemic.

His parents, Soumya and Phanikumar, were newbies, too — “like deer in the headlights,” his father said. “Mihir won his school contest, and it seemed like next thing we knew we were in D.C. It all happened so fast.”

Mihir Konkapaka holds his first San Diego County Spelling Bee trophy at his home on March 17, 2022.

(Eduardo Contreras/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Both parents are trained as electrical engineers. He works at Qualcomm, and she’s a homemaker and substitute teacher. Mihir is their only child.

This year, they’re helping him with studying — using some of the tips they got from Nandipati, the former champion — and paying attention to things like flight schedules and arrival times, to help Mihir be rested and get acclimated before the competition starts.

They hope he does well, but they want him to enjoy the experience, too. His fondest memories of last year’s bee are the extracurricular activities: tours of museums, social activities with the other contestants.

“We want him to be a kid,” his mom said. That means saying “yes” if he asks to go to Disneyland when they’re coming home from a Science Olympiad in Los Angeles. That means Thursday night dinners at Chipotle, where his favorite meal is a veggie burrito.

It also means no smartphone for him, not yet.

Winning the national spelling bee is a one-time thing. No repeat champions allowed. That would be fine with Mihir. Spelling bees “are a good chance to show off,” he said, but also stressful.

And if he doesn’t win? He said he’d try again next year.