Ryan School Students Reach Across The Globe On World Math Day

(Editor's note: The following article was submitted by Barbara Jagla of the Ryan School.)

Technology classes had a grand time during the online World Math Day event, March 7, 2012. The theme for this year was “Uniting the World in Numbers!” Mrs. Spollen and Mrs Jagla, Grade 6 and Grade 5 instructional technology teachers at the Ryan organized their classes for this exciting global challenge.

On World Math Day, students answered math facts in real-time with students from over 200 countries around the world. 430 Ryan School students participated and answered 79,807 questions correctly!! Emily Satterfield was the top scoring student in grade 6, answering 1134 questions correctly. Grade 5’s top scoring student was Anthony Miano, who answered 769 questions correctly. Students were matched with up to 3 other students of similar age and ability in exhilarating live challenges. Participants progressed through 5 levels of difficulty in arithmetic and mental computation, and earned 1 point for every correct answer. Each event had 50 challenges in total, meaning students could complete each event in around an hour - either in a computer class at school, and/or from home. This could be done in separate sittings over the 48 hours of each event.

According to the folks at World Education Games, “over the last 5 years, students have shown an average improvement of over 30% in speed and accuracy on World Math Day, making it a powerful way to improve core computation and number skills”.

3P Learning in Australia is the publishing team behind Mathletics, a mathematics e-learning program that has become the world's most used educational website. It is also the team behind World Math Day. Beginning in 2007, World Math Day was originally held on the March 14 (Pi Day), and then on the 1st Wednesday in March in subsequent years. In 2011, 5.3 million students from over 215 countries combined to correctly answer 428,598,214 mathematics questions.