'Amazing Race'-style tournament engages students from five districts
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For 20 minutes, "Team Awesome" wrestled with geometrically shaped pieces.
"Oh joy! We got it!" shouted 16-year-old Matt Esch, a10th-grader from North Hills High School. He and fellow classmates Jacob Ravinovitz, Sean McCarthy and Richie Ley had feverishly worked on solving increasingly difficult puzzles in a North Park pavilion during The Allegheny Math Partnership's senior math event April 28.
Held every other year in North Park, the event is the culmination of brainstorming by math teachers from school districts in Pittsburgh's northern suburbs who meet monthly to exchange thoughts and ideas through The Allegheny Math Partnership. Chosen because of their high marks in math, nearly 130 high school students - 96 competitors and 24 Advance Placement students who helped with timing, scoring and record keeping - participated in this year's tournament, fashioned after the television show, "The Amazing Race."
The competition called for students in teams of four to solve timed mathematical equations, moving from pavilion to pavilion. Topics included problem solving and working with linear and quadratic equations in algebra, geometry and other disciplines. Students were scheduled to compete from Avonworth, North Hills, Mars Area, Meadville, and Riverside school districts.
In addition to those districts, teachers from Hampton, North Allegheny and Allegheny Valley are members of the parntership.
"We get together monthly to talk about hot topics, like assessments, testing, and curriculum in high school and junior high math," said Andy Bednar, a Mars Area teacher who has been a member of the Allegheny Math Partnership for the past six years. "We're fortunate that our districts allow us to share strategies and teaching methods with other teachers like this."
Using questions designed by partnership teachers throughout the year, the event lets students engage in meaningful and fun mathematical investigations in a competitive format that also gets everyone out of the confines of school for the morning.
The morning consisted of six stations in which teams of four students solved a variety of math problems using advanced techniques in algebra, geometry, spatial relationships, and quadratic equations. Quadratic equations involve quantites that are squared, but none that are raised to a higher power. One station also incorporated a relay race.
First Published May 12, 2011 6:17 am
