Griffin Caskey, left, and Landon Humble
Griffin Caskey, left, coach Rebecca Yoder and Landon Humble
Griffin Caskey and Landon Humble, 5th graders from Mid-Prairie Middle School, participated at the Elementary Mathleague National Championship on Saturday, June 15, 2019 at Texas A&M University. They were among 391 3rd-6th graders from 16 states, DC, the Philippines, Saipan, and Indonesia at this top level competition. 3,010 students nationwide participated in local contests before 1,973 students competed in State meets to determine qualifiers for Nationals.
Mathleague.org is a network of local and state math competitions at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Mathleague.org's philosophy includes a belief that “math contests should be a learning experience...and students should be exposed to brand new problems at every contest, should be allowed to keep their test questions and completed answer sheets, and should be given solutions to all problems at the conclusion of the contest.” Mid-Prairie 4th-8th graders, coached by Rebecca Yoder, and high schoolers, coached by Kurtis Broeg, participated in the local contest held at Regina Elementary in March. Griffin Caskey, Landon Humble, Lincoln Miller, and Jacob Flynn, advanced to the Iowa State competition in April, and Griffin Caskey and Landon Humble advanced to Nationals.
The Elementary National Competition consisted of 5 testing rounds: Number Sense, Sprint Round, Target Round, Team Round, and Countdown Round. The 10-minute Number Sense test included 80 questions intended for students to solve mentally. The 40-minute Sprint Round consisted of 30 multiple-choice questions. The target test was made up of 4 pairs of problems with 6 minutes per pair. One to four team members from each school then worked together for 20 minutes on the 10-problem team test. Finally, the top 8 individual contestants competed head-to-head to determine the individual winner for the contest.
The National competition concluded with an Awards Dinner and Banquet on Saturday night including remarks, countdown round, guest speaker Dr. Robin Murphy (Raytheon Professor of Computer Science, co-founder of the field of disaster robotics, and founder of Roboticists Without Borders), and presentation of awards.
This was the first year students from Iowa attended the Elementary Mathleague National Championship. Griffin Caskey and Landon Humble represented Mid-Prairie Middle School well as 2 of the 11 Iowa representatives at Nationals.
The Mid-Prairie team especially enjoyed the challenge of these difficult problems and are already excited to keep problem-solving, discussing possible solution strategies, and expanding mathematical abilities and interests.