By Wendy Greenberg
Members of the Princeton High School Math Team have enjoyed competing in math tournaments and national competitions. Wanting their younger counterparts to enjoy a similar experience, they created a tournament for budding problem solvers in grades 3 through 8, and hosted some 450 participants in person, and 100 more in an online component.
Some 0-15 high school students developed math problems appropriate for the participating grade levels, and created the Princeton Math Tournament, which ran on January 31, and online on February 1. Initially not knowing what to expect, attendees hailed from elementary and middle school students, mostly in teams of three, from 60 schools across New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including Princeton public and private schools.
The online tournament had nearly 100 participants from 10-plus states the following day.
Math Team advisor Prutha Patel wrote in an email that “to our best knowledge, it is one of the biggest high school student-organized tournaments in New Jersey in terms of prize pool and number of participants.”
The core group formed a team for pre-event planning and preparations, and expanded to about 40 high school volunteers for the event, according to Math Team Captain Maiya Qiu, a junior. The volunteers were then organized into different sectors including marketing, logistics, problem writing, and general communications based on their skills and experiences. Students from West Windsor-Plainsboro, other area districts, and Princeton University helped out.
“We definitely had hundreds of problems written, and the problem writing team went to great lengths to select original questions that did not merely demand for rote memorization of a formula” said Qiu.
The planning was detailed, down to keeping parents engaged too. Apart from the math rounds and activities (including a guessing gallery) for kids, the high school cafeteria was a space for parents to connect while students were competing. A scholar from the Institute for Advanced Study, mathematician Dieter Kotschick, whose home institution is Ludwig Maximilian University of Germany, gave a talk to parents. Comments from parents were highly positive, Qiu noted.
Sponsorships helped fund the tournament prizes. All participants received a card deck or Rubik’s Cube, and others received clipboards and gift cards, and entered raffles.
Competitors were split into two divisions: Grades 6 through 8 and Grades 3 through 5, with a four-round tournament, including a Sprint Round (30 questions in 40 minutes); a Target Round (four pairs of questions); a Puzzle Round (with each set introducing students to a new math topic they most likely have not seen before); and a Team Round, with the last set being estimation problems.
“It was designed to be challenging even for gifted students,” said Qiu. And, when the problems and answers were later released, they could discuss the problems further with their friends and school math clubs, she added.
The event was also a transformative experience for the high schoolers, she said, with the volunteers working as a team to host such a large event — from the initial planning and sponsorship acquisitions, to finalizing the test questions and site set up.
The attendees “had a lot of fun, and we hope that on top of the teamwork, they also got a peek at the kind of math they might see again in a STEM career,” said Qiu. The math problems, especially those of the puzzle round, were a change from their standard classwork.
Despite the hard work that went into the tournament organization, and writing hundreds of math problems, the team seems to be satisfied that they made an impression on the young students. Simply, said Qiu, “We want to inspire them to love math.”