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Recently, some of our Upper School students competed in a math competition. The AMC 8 is the nation's leading mathematics competition for middle school students and is designed to cultivate the next generation of problem solvers' mathematical capabilities. The AMC 8 is open to anyone in grades 5-grade 8, though it's typically taken by students in eighth grade or taking an eighth-grade equivalent course.
Seventh-grade student, Xian (Clarence) Wu received gold for our top school winners out of those who participated. Additionally, he was recognized for being in the top 5% nationally.
Additional top school winners are:
Silver
- Tyler Mo and Nate Lawton
Bronze
- Hannah Castiglione
- Jillian Miller
- Tara Nash
- Caspar von Hollen
In 2019, approximately 150,000 students worldwide participated in the AMC 8. Students who take the AMC 8 have the opportunity to develop creative quantitative thinking skills, which better prepares them to succeed in high school/secondary school math classes. Furthermore, mathematics drives the innovations that shape our society and is useful in a broad range of careers, even those that are not traditionally mathematical, scientific, or technological in nature.
By offering these competitions, the Mathematical Association of America aims to challenge and inspire students to become lifelong learners of mathematics. But the real rewards come from challenging each student with mathematics that is new, different, and "outside the box." Competition problems are more complicated than those encountered routinely in math courses. Still, they are designed to connect to middle school mathematics standards to ensure they are within reach of students. The measure of success of the competition is not the number of problems solved but is the level of engagement with the mathematics that arises from the intellectual challenge of the problem-solving process.