On Saturday, June 19, 2021 Mid-Prairie Middle School 5th grade students, Madilynn Liska and Gwendolyn Wunderlich participated in the virtual Elementary Mathleague National Championship. They were among more than 450 3rd-6th graders from across the United States at this top level competition. This was Mathleague.org’s 8th National Championship and 2nd ever virtual championship.
Mathleague.org is a network of local and state math competitions at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. They run over 400 contests globally and reach over 30,00 students each year. 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 Rensema, participated in the local qualifying rounds before advancing to State then 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.
The National competition concluded with an Awards Ceremony on Saturday evening including remarks, countdown round, guest speaker, and presentation of awards. The countdown round consisted of the top 16 individual contestants competing head-to-head to determine the individual winner for the contest.
This was the third year students from Iowa attended the Elementary Mathleague National Championship and the third year in a row that Mid-Prairie Middle School students qualified for Nationals.