Upcoming Math Circles

The next Middle School Math Circles will be on Saturday, March 9th and Saturday, April 6th from 9am to 12 noon. At the March 9th Math Circle we will be giving the Math Talent Quest Competition. This is a contest to select 4 middle school students to participate in the Hua Luo Geng Golden Cup Youth Invitational Competition in China in the summer of 2013. The usual cost of $25 will be waived for students taking the contest that day.

Additionally, the Hammond Math Contest will take place on Saturday, April 13th. The contest will allow up to 12 students from the same middle school to participate, but students can also participate as individuals if there are fewer than 4 students from your school. Any middle school student from South Carolina is welcome to participate. The cost will be $8 per student to cover the cost of lunch and awards. Send me an e-mail at gauss202@yahoo.com for more details.

Middle School Math Circle on Saturday, June 23rd

Greetings Everyone,

The next Middle School Math Circle meeting will be on this Saturday, June 23rd at Hammond School from 9am to 12 noon. The cost for the Math Circle is $25 for each student. Rising 9th graders are still encouraged to participate in the Middle School Math Circle until the High School Math Circle begins again in September. For those students that have been before, please bring with you your book, Competition Math for Middle School, as well as your problems from the last Math Circle meeting. Please note that due to a conflict we’ve had to cancel the meeting that we were planning for Saturday, August 4th. However, the subsequent meeting scheduled for Saturday, Austust 25th is still planned.

Normally it’s not necessary for people to pre-register for Math Circle meetings, but for the summer meetings it would be nice to know how many students to expect. So if you receive this e-mail and you intend to come to the meeting this Saturday, please shoot me a reply to let me know. Feel free to spread the word about the Math Circle to anyone that you think may be interested.

If you’re looking for some good math problems to ponder, head over to the Art of Problem Solving’s online Forum:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php and look at the problems in their Middle School Forums. There are some very good problems and discussions there!

You can also start solving problems on your own from their problem database called Alcumus:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Alcumus/Introduction.php

You can set focus topics for the questions you want to get (Prealgebra, Algebra, Geometry, Number Theory, or Counting and Probability), or you can leave them all active to get a full mix of topics. When you come across a question you don’t know how to solve, there are also great videos that you can watch discussing ideas from these topics :

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Videos/index.php

Best Regards,

Marcus Neal

Math Prize for Girls 2012

The application deadline for the 2012 Math Prize for Girls is coming up soon: June 15. More details can be found at http://mathprize.atfoundation.org/. The contest is Sept 22 at MIT. Some financial support is available for travel for USAMO and USAJMO qualifiers. All AMC 10/12 participants in Feb 2012 are welcome to apply!

Also, the Middle School Math Circle will meet on this coming Saturday, June 9th at Hammond School from 9am to 12 noon. I look forward to seeing as many of you as can make it.

Marcus

Summer Dates for the Middle School Math Circle

Greetings Everyone,

The Middle School Math Circle will meet on Saturday, May 12th from 9am to 12noon. In addition, here are the dates on which the Middle School Math Circle will meet during the summer:

Saturday, June 9th
Saturday, June 23rd
Saturday, August 4th
Saturday, Austust 25th

Rising 9th grade students are welcome to attend the Middle School Math Circle attend until the High School Math Circle starts up again in September. Please feel free to spread the word about the Math Circle to anyone you think may be interested in attending. Also, thank you for your support of the Middle School Math Circle over the first two years of its existence. I think the students who have been attending have shown great improvement, and several have now moved on to form a strong part of our All-State Math Team.

I encourage all students to register an account at The Art of Problem Solving website - www.artofproblemsolving.com and to work on problems from the forums there as well as problems from Alcumus. It’s a great way to get exposure to new mathematical and to improve your math ability over the summer. They also offer online classes there that are very good. For further information, feel free to contact me.

Marcus Neal

Math Talent Quest Contest

I will be sponsoring any students from SC that would like to participate in a new math contest called the Math Talent Quest. The contest is open to students currently in grades 1-8.  It will be held on Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 at Hammond School at 4:00pm. Please contact me for more information if you, or someone you know, is interested in participating.

The website with information and some sample problems is here: http://www.mathtalentquest.org/

Mathcounts Practice Problems

Looking for problems for Mathcounts practice? Here is a great site for problems: http://mathcounts.saab.org/mc.cgi

Middle School Math Circle Dates

Greetings Everyone,

Here is the schedule for the Middle School Math Circle meetings for the next few months:

Saturday, February 18th

Saturday, March 10th

Saturday, April 21st

Saturday, May 12th

The meetings will all take place at Hammond School from 9am to 12noon, and the cost for each meeting is $25.

Marcus Neal

Hammond Middle School Math Contest on Feb, 4th

Greetings Everyone,

I am pleased to announce that Hammond School in Columbia, SC will be the host to a Middle School Math Contest on Saturday, February 4th, 2012, from 9:00 am to 2:30 pm. This contest will be a joint collaboration between Hammond School and the Columbia Middle School Math Circle. The organizers of the contest will be John Rushman, a former middle school mathematics teacher at Crayton Middle School and Hammond School, and Marcus Neal, an upper school mathematics teacher at Hammond School and assistant coach of the South Carolina All-State Math Team.

Each participating school may bring 4 to 12 students – with the students divided into teams of 3 or 4. (The only exception being if a school brings exactly 5 students, then they should be divided into a team of 3 and a team of 2). Each team from a school should be given a unique name which begins with the name of their school – for example, “The Hammond Radicals”. The cost of participation in the contest will be $10 per student.

The contest will be similar in format to the Mathcounts Competitions in that there will be two individual rounds and a team round. For those who participated last year, the problems will be a bit easier than last year, but with a few problems that will still challenge your best students. This year we will have more prizes and awards, including a new TI-Npsire CX for the first place individual, prizes for each sponsor, and lots of door prizes!

Details of Rounds and Scoring:

• The first individual round will consist of 25 multiple choice questions with 5 answer choices for each question. The time limit for this round will be 50 minutes. Each question answered correctly in this round will earn 5 points, each incorrect answer will earn 0 points, and each question left blank will earn 1 point – this is to make the test statistically guessing neutral.
• The second individual round will consist of 15 free response questions. The time limit for this round will be 45 minutes. Each correct answer in this round will earn 5 points and each incorrect or blank answer will earn 0 points.
• An individual’s score will be the sum of their points from these two rounds.
• Each team from each school will participate in the Team Round. This round will consist of 10 free response questions and will have a time limit of 20 minutes. Each correct answer on the team round will earn 10 points and each incorrect or blank answer will earn 0 points towards the team’s score.
• A school’s score will be the sum of their four highest individual scores (regardless of which team) plus the score of whichever of their teams scores highest on the Team Round.
• Awards will be given to the top three individuals, the top three schools, and the highest scoring student from each grade who did not already receive a top three individual award.
• Ties will be broken for the individual awards by looking at the questions in the reverse order on the free response round until only one student has the correct answer. Ties for the team round will be broken by the looking at the questions in the reverse order on the team round.
• Students from schools with fewer than 3 participants may register as individuals. They will be eligible for individual awards, and will be placed into teams with other individuals to participate in the Team Round for practice only.

 

Schedule of the Day:

Registration (Barks Hall Conference Room) – 9:00am – 9:30am

Multiple Choice Round – 9:30am – 10:20am

Free Response Round – 10:25am – 11:10am

Break – 11:10am – 11:20am

Team Round – 11:20am – 11:50am

Lunch – 11:50am – 12:30pm

Math Activity – 12:30pm – 1:15pm

Speaker or Math Activity – 1:15pm – 2:00pm

Awards Ceremony (Hammond School Chapel) – 2:00pm – 2:30pm

I hope that you will consider bringing a group of students to participate in this year’s contest. Math contests are a great way to inspire students to study mathematics outside of the classroom, and they promote higher level critical thinking and problem solving skills. I also hope that this contest will serve as a good warm-up contest for those students participating in the Mathcounts Chapter Competition in February.

To register for this contest, please go to the following website and fill in the indicated information:

http://tinyurl.com/HammondMathContestRegistration

The deadline to register for the contest will be 10pm on Friday, January 27^th, 2011, but please respond earlier than the deadline if you can so that I can begin making preparations based on the number of students we might expect. You can go back to the website to edit your information after the registration deadline but before 10pm on Wednesday, February 1^st.

Payment for the contest should be made out to Hammond School. Payment may be made during the registration period on the morning of the contest, or may be mailed in advance to:

Hammond Middle School Math Contest

c/o Marcus Neal

854 Galway Lane

Columbia, SC 29209

 

I look forward to hearing your response,

Marcus Neal (Contest Coordinator)

Teacher of Mathematics

Hammond Upper School

mneal@hammondschool.org

803-587-3525

AMC8 Practice Tests and Materials

Here are some AMC 8 Practice Tests for you to use to prepare for the AMC 8:

http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2002
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2002-solutions 
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2006 
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2006-solutions 
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2007 
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2007-solutions 
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2009 
http://tinyurl.com/AMC8-2009-solutions 

The 2011 exam will be given on Tuesday, November 15th. If your school is not participating in the AMC 8, you may take it with the Columbia Math Circle at Hammond School on Nov. 15th. We will administer the exam from 3:45-4:45. Send me a message at gauss202@yahoo.com if you are interested in taking the exam with the Math Circle.

New Dates for the Middle School Math Circle

Greetings Everyone,

The meeting which was originally scheduled for Saturday, September 17th has been postponed to Saturday, September 24th.

Here is the schedule for the Math Circle meetings for the rest of the 2011 calendar year:

Saturday, September 24th

Saturday, October 8th

Saturday, November 5th

Saturday, December 3rd

The meetings will all take place at Hammond School from 9am to 12noon, and the cost for each meeting is $25.

Marcus Neal