It took a couple of weeks but the results are in -- finally!
FIRST PLACE
PINK PANDA TEAM
Canadian Academy
Kobe, Japan
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SECOND PLACE (TIE)
WALLINGTON HS (SENIOR TEAM)
Wallington, NJ
THE BLACK SWAN TEAM
Canadian Academy
Kobe, Japan
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THIRD PLACE (TIE)
WALLINGTON HS (JUNIOR TEAM)
Wallington, NJ
DECATUR AREA HOMESCHOOLERS
Decatur, Il
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FOURTH PLACE (TIE)
LAKE STEVENS HS TEAM I
LAKE STEVENS HS TEAM II
Lake Stevens, WA
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Comments
- Winning score was 9 pts out of a possible 14
- Median score was 4
- Participation was down for this contest but opening it up to more than one team from a school proved very successful. Some schools which had planned on participating found the timing at the end of May to be very problematic and had to drop out after registering. I'll remember that for next year!
- Hardest problems involved trigonometric derivations and a probability question requiring an infinite series.
- This contest definitely proved harder than the first and several questions were designed for the upper level secondary student.
- Future contests may be split into a 9th-10th grade version and an 11th-12th grade version similar to AMC-10 and -12.
- Students indicated the contest was challenging but expressed interest in participating again.
- The open-ended questions required considerable effort on students' parts and mine in grading them!
- The winning team sent a highly detailed and original solution to one of the trig questions. They wrote it by hand and scanned it. This technology works very well for this kind of contest.
- I will probably publish 1 or 2 of the questions with answers and partial solutions on this blog in the near future.
- Any schools interested in participating in the fall should send me an email now ("dmarain at gmail dot com") to get on my mailing list. I've already received several emails. At this time I plan on keeping the contests "free to a good home"!
- I am very excited about the international flavor of these contests -- this seems highly appropriate given the culture being established by our current administration. The world really is becoming "one out of many!"
- As mentioned previously, one of my goals is to publish 10-12 of these contests with detailed solutions as a book or pdf document which can be downloaded for a nominal fee.
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF OUR PARTICIPATING TEAMS!
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2 comments:
Thank you for the contest. It was great fun! Definitely harder than the first one, and with a successful "gotcha!" component in that first question. But it gave my students a chance to learn about geometric series, which none of them had been exposed to before, and they did pretty well with that part of it. They didn't finish within the time period, but explained it just fine in our discussion afterward.
Thank you, Denise.
Yes, the questions were more advanced and the 45 min time limit makes it even more challenging, particularly with the open-ended questions. The "gotcha" problem is of the type I frequently write. I think students can definitely learn from these (to be more careful!).
Overall, I don't think I would change much other than perhaps offering a less advanced version for the younger students.
Making up one of these contests is fairly time-consuming and labor intensive as all the questions are original. Of course, I get ideas from other problems I've seen but in many cases I play around with some ideas and new variations. With math, the possibilities are endless but, with so many math contests out there, students are now seeing hundreds of problems a year. After awhile they're bound to recognize familiar ones! But that's fine...
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