Math Challengers Competition

By Mr. B. Ito, Senior School Math Teacher 

On Saturday, February 1, seven dedicated grade 8 students participated in the Math Challengers Competition at SFU. This intensive four-stage competition brought together top math students from across the Lower Mainland to test their problem-solving skills in two individual events, Blitz and Bull's Eye, and a team event, The Co-op.

Leading up to the competition, our teams invested a lot of time and effort preparing for WPGA’s inaugural participation in this highly competitive event, meeting weekly to develop computation skills and practise team-building exercises and one-on-one challenges. We had fun, though, and succeeded in meeting--in fact, surpassing--our goals. 

At SFU’s Shrum Centre, among hundreds of equally passionate competitors, our two teams had an impressive, albeit exhaustive, morning session, attempting to solve 26 problems in the Blitz stage and 12 questions in the Bull's Eye stage in two 45-minute blocks. We were hoping to have at least one of our team members make the "Face-Off" cut, and when Chloe Chen’s name was announced, we were all thrilled. Chloe had placed 8th in the earlier individual stages and so met the 9th and 10th placed competitors. The final stage, Face-Off, took the top 10 individuals from the two individual stages to “face-off" against each other in a Jeopardy-style event, with the winner moving on to the next round. The 10th place student played the 9th, with the winner moving on to compete against the 8th, and so on. As such, the 10th place student would have to win all nine rounds to win the title, whereas the top scoring student only had to win one.

For the first "Face-Off" question, Chloe hit her buzzer before the question was completed, correctly answering the question "What is the area of a square with perimeter 44?" (Answer: 121). She won this best-of-two round and vanquished her next competitor, too. Though she lost to the 6th-ranked competitor 2-1, Chloe did our school proud with her formidable spirit and talent, placing 8th in the combined Blitz/Bull's Eye stages and 7th in the Face-Off division. 

Please applaud our math challengers for their passion, dedication and number know-how: Darius Chan, Chloe Chen, Patrick Sun, Daniel Wang, Xixi Wang, George Yu and Julia Yuan.

Update: This just in--our top team qualified for Provincials! They came 4th in their pool and 12th overall in our region with a score of 27.5 points. The Provincials take place Saturday, March 8 at UBC. Congratulations, Daniel, Chloe, Xixi and Julian!