Their calculators poised, scrap and key sheets in hand, pencil sharpened, erasers set, and mind ready to calculate math – 57 students prepared for the Mu Alpha Theta regional competition on January 29. Already on their second competition, the Mu Alpha Theta students and chaperones head off to Tampa Bay Tech. their only transportation; two school buses and around nine and a half hours dedicated to mathematics.
Instead of sleeping in till noon, the attending competitors must wake up early – competitors and chaperones are expected to leave the school at 7:30am – and expect to return home a little after 5:00pm. Students will be chaperoned by three parents and three math teachers; Mrs. Linder, Mrs. Loring, and Mr. Holmes. Once there, students will be expected to participate in individual and team competitions.
“For team,” sophomore Sarah Hou said. “What we did last year was take the top four individuals. If one couldn’t make it, we had a sub.”
This year, students must take the qualifier. In other words, they must take an individual round and the student’s with the top five best scores are selected for the team competitions. There are three teams per division. Students covered divisions in calculus, pre-calculus, algebra two, and statistics.
According to Mrs. Linder, how it works is that whatever subject you are currently taking at school (whether it is calculus or algebra two) is the division you are put in. However, said Mrs. Linder, the students can choose a higher level division (For example, coming from pre-calculus to Calculus); they just can’t go down a level.
The calculus team and statistics team both won first place while both the Pre-calculus team and algebra 2 team received second place. The students then won sweepstakes, which is an overall score compared to all 28 schools competing, taking first place again.
In the individual rounds, for pre-calculus, sophomore Zhicheng Qiao scored 3rd while sophomore Sarah Hou took 6th. In calculus, senior James Tian placed 2nd while senior Sitharthan Sekar took 6th and senior Ambika Anand took 9th. For Algebra 2, freshman Aadith Moorthy placed 3rd while freshman Mohamed Nuh and Zaydi Javeed placed 5th and 6th. And in Statistics, Alec Sokol placed 1st while Mathew Weingarten placed 2nd, Masi Javeed socred 3rd, Miranda Goot scored 5th and Dominic Guzzo scored 8th.
The Mu Alpha Theta has four more regional and state competitions to look forward to.