Aragon students inspire math skills at local middle schools

Headed by senior Amrit Saxena, the Aragon Mathematical Talent Development Committee (MTDC), a club that fosters mathematical abilities in middle school students, plans to hold a math competition to encourage the celebration and continued development of their math skills. The Aragon Math League (AML) competition screens more than 300 students for seats at the Aragon Math Marathon (AM2), the math competition scheduled for January 7, 2011.

With such a successful competition last year, math teams are more interested in competing in the AM2, so to give schools a fair chance for the most number of competitors, schools that score well will receive the ability to enter more competitors. Middle schools throughout the Bay Area already gave their students the first part of a three-part competition that consisted of six questions designed by Aragon students.

Saxena and his friends, have been planning the math competition since they entered high school, “The event happened last January so it took two years [to] get things together” states math teacher and advisor, Andrea Gould. Writing all the questions and working on the competition for two long years by themselves, the MTDC students organized the help of other Aragon students with the incentive of Silver Sword points to correct the tests, feed the middle school students, and help give out certificates to the competitors. Leaders of this group participate in many mathematical competitions themselves and understand firsthand what works at a competition and what does not.

Middle schools all over the Bay Area were invited for the AM2 competition last year; which included both team and individual contests. Over 120 students attended this event.

To help encourage students of all levels of math ability, there were two divisions for the team section of the competition. This is a key distinction from knowledge gained from the experience of the Aragon leaders. This year, the MTDC expects more interest from many schools; as a result the Aragon Math League will make sure the contest this year will not be overcrowded with participants.

During the final of the individual round in the AM2 middle school’s top “mathletes” wracked their brains trying to answer difficult problems such as, “A wooden cube n units on a side is painted red on all six faces and then cut into n3 unit cubes. Exactly one-third of the total number of faces of the unit cubes is red. What is the value of n?”

Last year’s top three placing teams for the team competition of division A were two teams from Bowditch and a team from Crocker. Keeping up their high placing standard, Bowditch also placed two of their three teams in the B division of the team section with Odyssey’s entry to the B division coming in second. Kevin Bai (Bowditch), Landon Chow (Redwood), and Sean Gao (Bowditch), took the top three spots for the individual competition. Both Bai and Gao are freshmen attending Aragon this year.

When asked about predictions for this year, Saxena says, “Anyone can win.”

“[They] always need help to [host] contests … [but] not everyone needs math talent…[to help]” Gould reminds Aragon students, hoping to rally more volunteers for this year’s larger competition.

Silver Sword Points rallied few students to assist last year, more were drawn by the “novel initiative” of the math competition according to Saxena; information on the competition was spread “mostly by word of mouth, email or Facebook”. With even more interest and more middle school students expected, the MTDC will need all the help they can get to pull off the competition.

Although the teachers attend the competition, the students truly run the contest. Despite some computer issue[s], the contest “ran like clockwork” last year; the leaders of the contest also flourished with their newly developed “organizational and people skills,” according to Gould.

Three of the winners of last year’s Aragon Math Marathon now attend Aragon, achieving one of the fundamental goals of the MTDC: to foster mathematical skills.