Math under pressure
Area students show off their skills in annual competition
Can you calculate unit price in under 10 seconds? How about finding the average of the first five prime numbers? Can you express the degree of a polyhedron when given just one integer? Figure out a2 + b2 = c2. Give up yet?
Alberto De La Torre of Centennial Middle School didn’t, and he outlasted 11 other competitors to win the countdown round of Friday’s MathCounts competition at the Yuma County Main library.
“If I don’t know anything, just guess, I guess,” De La Torre said of his strategy, “and just trying to stay calm under pressure. It’s really nerve-wracking.”
Middle school students from eight Yuma-area schools participated in this year’s competition, said Gen Grosse, community relations manager for the Yuma International Airport, which is one of the sponsors for the event.
MathCounts is similar to a spelling bee and is the only competition program of its kind, according to the MathCounts website, except students aren’t spelling words, they’re solving intense, high-level math problems.
Students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades work on problems in four timed rounds, a “sprint,” a “target,” a team round and the final “countdown.” The top individuals from the sprint and target rounds make up the final countdown round, where students go head-to-head against one another in trying to solve math problems in 60 seconds.
Friday’s countdown round was grueling. The top four scorers got a bye for the first round, as pairs of students competed against one another. By the end of the countdown, all of the top individual scorers had been eliminated. Only De La Torre and Paola Ruvalcaba of San Luis Middle School remained. The two went head-to-head for several nail-biting minutes.
Woodard Junior High math teacher Sarah Connell, who has been the math coach for about 10 years, said the competition is a good mixer for students who excel at math.
“Talking to them after the first round, they were all cool to see who got it,” she said. “It’s a neat experience for them to see other kids who are good at math.”
The state event, which has a national governing body, started way back in the 1950s, said volunteer Larry Hunt, a member of the Arizona Society of Professional Engineers, Yuma Chapter, who helped put on the first state event way back when.
The Yuma event has only been going on about 30 (or 35) years, Hunt said. It is mainly run by the Yuma Chapter of the Arizona Society of Professional Engineers of which there are several chapters in the state.
Running the event takes a lot of volunteers, said Roger Patterson, the flood control manager for Yuma County (and an engineer). There were about 14 volunteer graders and three proctors monitoring the testing rounds. The graders come from various engineering firms in town and from Arizona Western College.
“We had 8 teams and 78 participants. It was really a good turnout,” Patterson said.
Results from the other regions must be tabulated before Yuma County will know what individuals and which teams will advance to the state level, Patterson said.
“It’s always the top team, and then they rank the individuals on a statewide competition, so there will be additional individuals that go, but I can’t tell you how many right now,” he said.
Many of the volunteers have been with the competition since its inception in Yuma, Patterson said, because they like seeing the kids grow through the years.
“My wife teaches calculus over in high school, and she’ll say, ‘How many of you have done MathCounts?’ and then half the class will raise their hand and they’re all excited,” he said. “This is an exciting experience for those kids. They remember it.”