On Saturday, June 20, 2020 Mid-Prairie Middle School students, Griffin Caskey (6th), Rowan Miller (6th), Ethan Schlabaugh (5th), and Jack Sorrell (5th) participated in the virtual Elementary Mathleague National Championship. They were among more than 400 3rd-6th graders from throughout the United States at this top level competition. Nearly 16,000 students nationwide participated in local contests before 1,582 students competed in State meets at 25 sites to determine qualifiers for Nationals. This was Mathleague.org’s 7th National Championship and first ever virtual championship.
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 5th-8th graders, coached by Rebecca Yoder, participated in the local contest held at Regina Elementary in February. Landon Humble, Griffin Caskey, Rowan Miller, Ethan Schlabaugh, Ethan Slay, and Jack Sorrell, advanced to the Iowa State competition in April, and Griffin, Rowan, Ethan Schlabaugh, and Jack advanced to Nationals.
The Elementary National Competition consisted of five testing rounds: Sprint Round, Number Sense, Target Round, Team Round, and Countdown Round. The 40-minute Sprint Round consisted of 30 multiple-choice questions. The 10-minute Number Sense test consisted of 80 questions intended for students to solve mentally. The target test consisted of four pairs of problems with six minutes per pair. Groups of one to four team members from each school then worked together for 20 minutes on the 10-problem team test. Finally, the top 16 individual contestants competed head-to-head in the countdown round to determine the individual winner for the contest.
The National competition concluded with an Awards Ceremony on Saturday evening including remarks, countdown round, guest speaker Richard Rsczyk (founder of Art of Problem Solving Inc.), and presentation of awards.
This was the second year students from Iowa attended the Elementary Mathleague National Championship and the second year in a row that Mid-Prairie Middle School qualified for Nationals.
Jack Sorrell
Ethan Schlabaugh
Griffin Caskey
Rowan Miller