The people in charge of the program wanted to encourage kids to pursue math at the middle school level. And the competition is designed by engineers to fill a gap that they were seeing.
There were just under 300 students at state, and that was narrowed down out of 2,000 at the chapter level. Placing fourth is pretty amazing.
I have seen a jump-in motivation of the students. They are actually sad that they are not going to compete anymore. They enjoy the challenge and like solving the problems.
After they are scored, the top 10 individually ranked kids go into a head-to-head competition called Countdown. It is kind of like Jeopardy.
Many of my students are now looking to the high school level, and this competition has inspired them to continue with their interest in math. Math is going to be even more import as we get further into the technology age.
