Math Olympiad
May 8, 2006
Kathryn Re, TMMS math teacher and math
team coach, contributed to the article below.
This weekend the Thunder Mountain Math Team competed at the Math Olympiad.
The contest is comprised of two parts: the problem-solving component
that requires multiple steps including explaining and justifying each
step and the mathematics strand section, which has a short 20-minute
test on the five strands in mathematics. Those strands are number
sense, geometric sense, measurement, probability, statistics, and
algebraic sense.
This year Thunder Mountain participated in the 8th grade competition
with team members A Smith, Z Johnston, and J Bryndza.
The team earned a Superior rating in the Problem Solving section
resulting in each student receiving a medal and a rating of Excellent
in the mathematics strand resulting in each student getting a ribbon.
The competition questions are based on the Grade Level Expectations,
so conceivably every student could take home a medal. At the contest
in Tacoma, however, we noticed that only about half of the teams
in any grade level received ribbons or medals, and less than a quarter
of the teams received medals. Our team did very well!
As I was picking up the results packets, another coach, hearing
the name Thunder Mountain, told me that he was one of the graders
for the Problem Solving paper from Thunder Mountain and he was very
impressed. When we looked at the results, Thunder Mountain had a
PERFECT SCORE! Wow!
Please congratulate these students with all the other students
that represented our school district so well at the various competitions
this last weekend.