Middle School Mathletes Compete at Regionals

Walnut Valley Unified School District middle schools from took top honors at the East SanGabriel Valley Chapter MATHCOUNTS Competition at Cal Poly Pomona.

WVUSD teams brought home three of the four top awards from the contest held on February 22 and 23.

The Chaparral Middle School team won 1^st Place, Suzanne Middle School took 3^rd Place honors, and South Pointe Middle School brought home the 4^th Place award.

The top ranked Chaparral team includes Benjamin Chen, William He, Matthew Ho, Jasmine Xu, Rajvir Dua, Frank Jiang, Brian Li, and Brian Chang. The students were coached by teacher/advisors Denise Loera and Tommy Pak.

Benjamin Chen won 1^st Place Individual and 2^nd Place in the Countdown Round

The 1^st Place team advanced to the California State Competition at University of California at Irvine on March 9.

Suzanne Middle School 8^th grader Mike Bao will also advance as an individual to the State Competition. He is coached by teacher and advisor Amy Erickson.

“I am extremely proud of our mathletes. This is the youngest team we have ever sent and they out performed expectations with grace and dignity under pressure,” Erickson said.

South Pointe Middle School won the 4^th Place team award and a 6^th grader received a 6^th Place individual award. The team is coached by teacher Gary Dresser.

Suzanne’s Aaron Chang won 4th place award in the afternoon Countdown Round. This contest is an unofficial part of the MATHCOUNTS competition because it does not determine whether students advance to the state competition. But, it is themost exciting part of the contest. Students go head-to-head (utilizing the sports bracket) in a match up with answers given orally for the top 16 students from the morning rounds.

They have 45 seconds to answer problems such as “Two similar right triangles have an area of 6 square units and 54 square units. The length of the hypotenuse of the smaller triangle is 5 units. What is the length, in units, of the hypotenuse of the larger triangle?” 

Many of the mathletes are able to do the calculations mentally without paper and pencil, and at times respond to the questions will the Master of Ceremonies is still reading the question.

A special thanks to two WVUSD alumni for their help at this year’s competition: currently on the UC Faculty – Dr. Charleston Chiang, UCLA Post-Doc in Biology and his wife Dr. Vivian U-Chiang, UC-Riverside Post-Doc in Astronomy.

 --Courtesy of the Walnut Valley Unified School District