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![“When I came into high school, I was ready to be a follower. But DECA was a game changer for me. It helped me overcome my fear of public speaking, and it's played such a major role in who I've become today. To be able to successfully lead a chapter of 150 students, an officer team and be one of the upperclassmen I once really admired is something I'm [really] proud of,” Anvitha Tummala ('21) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-25-at-9.50.05-AM-900x594.png)
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![“[Volleyball has] taught me how to fall correctly, and another thing it taught is that you don’t have to be the best at something to be good at it. If you just hit the ball in a smart way, then it still scores points and you’re good at it. You could be a background player and still make a much bigger impact on the team than you would think,” Anya Gert (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AnnaGert_JinTuan_HoHPhotoEdited-600x900.jpeg)
![“I'm not nearly there yet, but [my confidence has] definitely been getting better since I was pretty shy and timid coming into Harker my freshman year. I know that there's a lot of people that are really confident in what they do, and I really admire them. Everyone's so driven and that has really pushed me to kind of try to find my own place in high school and be more confident,” Alyssa Huang (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AlyssaHuang_EmilyChen_HoHPhoto-900x749.jpeg)
Math Club members participate in annual online competition
Joanna Lin (12) works on a problem during a practice round for last year’s online math competition Math Madness on Sept. 27. Competitors worked on math problems online in 20 minute sessions.
October 11, 2016
Members of the upper school Math Club are currently competing in Math Madness, an online math tournament.
Sponsored annually by AreteLabs, an online academic competition host, Math Madness invites middle and high school students to form teams with classmates and compete against groups from other schools in the United States. This year’s competition began with a practice round on Sept. 27.
Skill level determines the matchups between teams after the practice round. Teams can play against each other live if they decide to compete at the same time or alternatively choose to compete at any time during the round’s week and have the winner announced once both teams have submitted their answers.
The competition does not center on a specific branch of mathematics and often reuses questions from other competitions, including the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) 10. As a result, participants of Math Madness can expect problems covering a variety of topics. Students participate individually for the first two preliminary rounds but work together in teams for the last two preliminary rounds.
“Each session is about 20 minutes, and basically whoever’s available can join and play for that session,” Math Club advisor Dr. Anuradha Aiyer said.
The second preliminary round of the competition began yesterday. After the four preliminary rounds, the 64 teams with the highest cumulative scores from the preliminary rounds will then participate in a series of six single-elimination rounds, a process based on the NCAA’s March Madness college basketball tournament.
Harker’s upper school team has placed first in Math Madness every year since Math Club began participating in the competition in 2013. Math Club co-Vice President Katherine Tian (10) believes that this year will be no exception.
“There’s a middle school league for Math Madness, so a lot of the freshmen do know the competition pretty well,” she said. “I do believe Harker will do as well as they did last year because we have smart people, and I believe in our ability to win.”
Because the competition is less difficult than other math contests, many participants of Math Madness do not prepare as much beforehand in comparison to tournaments they find more challenging.
“It’s basically meant as a relaxation round, because it’s not as hard as the other competitions we do,” Math Club co-Vice President Misha Ivkov (12) said. “We just want new members to get some experience with math competitions.”
Jeffrey Kwan (9), who did not participate in Math Madness at the Middle School, looks forward to honing his math skills by participating in this year’s competition.
“It’s a fun online contest, and it helps me practice some math problems in a competitive setting,” he said.
Math Madness will continue throughout October until the week of Nov. 4, the start of the final round of the competition, unless the upper school team does not rank as one of the top 64 teams at the end of the preliminary rounds or if they lose an elimination round.
This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on October 11, 2016.
