Armed with pencils, calculators and memorized mathematical formulas, 7th- and 8th-grade students from Rugby, Hendersonville, Flat Rock and Apple Valley middle schools crunched numbers during Henderson County Public Schools’ annual MATHCOUNTS challenge at Flat Rock Middle.
In its twelfth year, the local competition is open to both public and private middle school students and prepares them for the state MATHCOUNTS competition and the Raytheon MATHCOUNTS National Competition – held this year in Boston, Mass. in May.
Students represent their schools in the local competition, participating in Sprint, Target and Team rounds. The school with the most points wins a trophy, and there are 10 individual winners.
And the math problems aren’t simple.
“This is 7th and 8th grade,” said Director of Secondary Education Sharon Ashe. “They have trigonometry problems in there, they have calculus problems in there.”
On Thursday, Ashe and the schools’ math coaches went over the rules with the teams.
“Your answers must be legible, or they won’t be counted,” said Angie Ford, 8th grade math teacher and math club coach at Flat Rock Middle.
In the Sprint Round, each student had 20 minutes to answer 20 problems – no calculators allowed. In the Target Round, calculators were allowed and students worked on two problems at a time; once the first set of problems was completed, they were handed two more problems and so on. In the Team Round, each school’s math team had 20 minutes to collaborate and solve 10 questions.
Rugby Middle’s math team won the school trophy and the top three individual winners were also from Rugby: Isaiah McAbee in first place, Andy Wilson in second, and Graham Grush in third.
Congratulations, and keep calculating!
(Article written by Molly McGowan Gorsuch, HCPS Public Information Officer.)