Vandana Kadam, middle school math chair, had her trigonometry students engaged in an interesting project in May. Separated into groups, students devised their own problems and solved them with the knowledge they had gained during their class sessions. To demonstrate how they solved the problems, the groups made posters and PowerPoint presentations. “The idea behind the project is to give students an in-depth understanding of the trigonometric concepts that were taught as part of the course and also see real-life applications of trigonometry,” Kadam said. “All students thoroughly enjoyed the project and did a fabulous job.”
David Zhu, grade 8, took fifth place in one of the toughest math competitions in the U.S.
Last Friday, student representatives from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Defense and State Department schools worldwide participated in the 2013 Raytheon Mathcounts national competition.
Each state is only allowed four competitors, making it much more difficult to qualify from California than other states; more than 250,000 students and 5,050 coaches participated in the opening round. For the national event May 9-12, 56 teams of four members each were invited to Washington, D.C.
Zhu was top scorer on the California team, with a perfect score of 46. The other California three team members were selected from a group of five students, all with 44 points, by tiebreaker. He was one of only four students nationwide who scored a perfect 46 in the State MathCounts competition. One of the others was the eventual national MathCounts champion.
In the National competition, the written round has two parts totaling 46 points. On Friday, 224 top “mathletes” competed over a two-hour period. Zhu, the only California team member to reach the top 12, scored 44 points, placing him seventh in the written round with the top 12 advancing to the countdown round. In the first part of the countdown round, “he beat his opponent,” said Vandana Kadam, middle school mathematics department chair, but was outpaced by his opponent in the next round, finishing a stellar fifth place at this year’s national MathCounts.
“This is a phenomenal achievement!,” said Kadam. “David has been extremely consistent in all math competitions during his middle school years and this is a perfect end to his MS math journey. Ranking fifth out of 224 top math students is no small feat.” Congratulations to Zhu on this major accomplishment!
Like many teens Urvi Gupta, grade 11, maintains a jam-packed schedule. An active student in Harker’s journalism program, she also plays as a starter on the school’s varsity volleyball team. After-school hours are spent practicing the violin, doing homework and hanging out with friends.
Yet Gupta also makes time to give back to her community by providing free math tutoring to K-3 kids at local libraries in San Jose using a unique program she created called OneInMath. The program teaches youngsters simple ways to add, subtract, multiply, divide and understand concepts quickly for math success.
“I designed the free volunteer-run program from the ground up, defining its purpose, goals and developing materials including 1,862 math problem sheets, teaching instructions, learning videos, program format, volunteer instructions, and the logistics of running it,” said Gupta, who teaches as well as independently manages the overall program.
She currently supervises more than 150 kids and 27 high school volunteers across three libraries using the program, which was implemented in November 2011. Now, the popular OneInMath classes – which utilize video instruction in addition to face-to-face volunteer tutoring – has both students and parents excited about learning mathematics.
Gupta said she was inspired to start tutoring math by her dad, who used to give her numerical problems every day when she was younger, which now helps her in high school math classes.
Consequently, she wished for other students to have the same opportunity she had to get a jump start on learning math. She also enjoys the good feeling that comes from volunteerism and tells teens thinking of starting or developing their own service project to “just go for it.”
“Whenever you have a new idea, there are lots of doubts and questions about whether or not it’s a good one. The best thing is to not overthink and just try it. It’s actually quite surprising how much interest people have in these types of projects. They truly appreciate your time and effort, and you feel really rewarded at the end,” she said.
Gupta was recently honored as Volunteer of the Year from the entire San Jose public library system for her dynamic math program and volunteer efforts. The top honor began with a nomination from local librarian Vidya Kilambi, who had been impressed with Gupta’s program for some time.
“Urvi’s amazing leadership and organizational skills are clearly demonstrated in the way she communicates with all the kids, teens, parents and staff at the different library locations,” said Kilambi, noting that in addition to her heavy school course load, Gupta juggles volunteer schedules, creates course content and tracks student progress.
The 12th annual Diana Nichols Math Invitational on March 10 was a “super success,” according to middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam. More than 300 participants from 23 schools took part in the contest, with several Harker students earning high placings.
In the grade 6 individual category, Rose Guan took fourth. Jerry Chen and Jimmy Lin took second and fifth, respectively, in the grade 7 individual contest. In the grade 7 team competition, Harker’s team of Chen, Jimmy Lin, Michael Kwan, Edgar Lin, Jeffrey Ma, Alexander Wang and Randy Zhao took first place.
The event included generous help from more than 30 upper school volunteers who helped administer the tests and write problems, and performed other tasks to make sure the event was well run. Grade 10 students Cindy Liu, David Lin and Ashwath Thirimalai, all of whom were participants at the invitational in their previous years at Harker, wrote problems for the exams. Liu also created the design that went on the T-shirts for this year’s event. “It is with pride I can say that the students who went through these contests as middle school students come back to write problems as upper school students,” Kadam said.
All middle school students participated in the California Math League contest on Feb. 19. The league states that a score of 14 points (out of 35) or higher is commendable and a score of 28 points or higher is exceptional. A school’s team score for each grade comprises of the top 5 scores in that grade, the highest being 175 points.
Grade 6’s team score was 160, with the top scorers being Rose Guan with a score of 34 and Katherine Tian with a score of 33. Andrew Chang, Constance Horng, Nishant Ravi and Cindy Wang all had 31 points. Other high scorers were Nicole Chen, Carl Gross and Sara Min, all with 30 points. Official results and rankings are still to come.
Competitors in grade 7 also had a team score of 160. Their top scorers were Shaya Zarkesh with 34 points and Rajiv Movva with 34 points. Adrian Chu, Edgar Lin and Jimmy Lin all had 31 points. Amy Jin, Michael Kwan, Neelesh Ramachandran and Randy Zhao also did very well, scoring 29 points.
Grade 8 had two perfect scores, with Kai-Siang Ang and Peter Wu both scoring 35 points. The team score was 166. David Zhu missed the perfect score by one point. Steven Cao, Ryan Chen, Arnav Tandon and Derrick Wang all had 31 points. Cuebeom Choi, Aditya Dhar, Soham Khan, Kedar Gupta, Ashwin Rao, Alayna Richmond, Vedaad Shakib, Misha Tseitlin and Austin Tuan all scored 29 points.
Harker also had several students take the AMC 10 and 12 exams on two different dates – Feb. 5 (10A or 12A) and Feb. 20 (10B). Students scoring above a certain cut-off determined by the Mathematical Association of America are invited to participate in the American Mathematics Invitational Exam (AIME), which will take place March 14. Six middle school students qualified for the AIME, which is geared toward high school students.
Harker’s top scorers in AMC 10A exam were David Zhu, Jimmy Lin, Edgar Lin and Quentin Delepine, grade 8. Kai-Siang Ang was the top scorer from Harker in the AMC 12A exam and one of the top scorers in the AMC 10B, along with Peter Wu.
Harker students performed well at the Santa Clara County chapter MathCounts contest on Feb. 9. Competing in what is considered to be one of the toughest chapters in the country, Harker’s team of grade 7 students Rajiv Movva and Shaya Zarkesh and grade 8 students Peter Wu and David Zhu placed second among 47 schools, just missing first place by less than a single point. David Zhu scored 44 out of a possible 46 points, placing fifth overall in the competition. Peter Wu scored 42 points, taking 12th. Jimmy Lin, grade 7, scored 41 points and took 18th place. More than 350 students participated in the competition.
“These students have worked very hard to reach this far. They even attended weekend training sessions apart from after-school sessions since September,” said middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam. “They truly deserve this success.”
Harker will head to the state competition on March 23 at Stanford University.
On March 10, Harker will host the 12th annual Diana Nichols Math Invitational at the middle school campus, open to all math students in grades 6-8. Students from schools all over the Bay Area as well as India and China will participate in the contest, which began in 2002 as the Harker Math Invitational before being renamed in 2011 to honor Diana Nichols, who was instrumental in the contest’s inception.
Middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam started the contest to foster the problem-solving skills of Bay Area middle school math students. “Given the competence of students from the Bay Area, I thought it would be good to have a contest that challenges their thinking and puts them in competition with students of similar caliber,” she said.
The first invitational featured six schools and 120 students. For its 10th anniversary, attendance was nearly triple that of the first contest, and for the first time international schools were invited to participate. A special test is designed for international students with the help of middle school math students in elective classes, who assist in making the problems more compatible with the foreign students’ curricula and integrating terminology they have become accustomed to in their classes. “Creating a separate contest for the international schools has definitely made it more exciting for the international students,” said Kadam.
The invitational has become a labor of love for the middle school’s math department, whose members work tirelessly each year to make it happen. “Right from making the contest to running the show on the day of the contest, every single member of the math department contributes in a big way towards the successful hosting of this huge event, which has grown tremendously in the last 12 years,” Kadam said.
Kadam has also made strides toward increasing the role of upper school student participation in running the contest. In past years, upper school students helped with registration, proctoring exams and grading. Recently they have assisted in designing problems for the participants. “Apart from a core group who work with me for several weeks to create the contest, a number of upper school volunteers help out on the day of the contest,” Kadam said. “They feel good about coming back to the middle school to make a difference.”
Harker students Richard Yi, grade 9, and Rahul Sridhar, grade 11, placed eighth and ninth, respectively, out of 276 participants at the CalTech Harvey Mudd Math Competition, held in mid-November at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. Additionally, Sridhar and Ashwath Thirumalai, grade 10, took third in the team competition, while Yi and sophomore David Lin’s team took fifth out of a total of 47 teams.
Harker was also among the top-performing schools in the California Mathematics League in November and December. The upper school tied for first place with 60 points and scored 54 points with the middle school students’ scores included. A total of 13 students earned a perfect score: Shaya Zarkesh, grade 7; David Zhu, grade 8; Michael Zhao, grade 9; Patrick Lin, Cindy Liu, Suzy Lou, Nitya Mani and Sachin Peddada, all grade 10; Varun Mohan, Alex Pei, Rahul Sridhar and Vikram Sundar, all grade 11; and Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12.
At the Mexican Mathematical Olympiad in November, Varun Mohan, grade 11, was one of four members the United States team that was one of 200 teams at the event. Mohan won silver, just a few points shy of the gold medal award.
In the Mandelbrot Competition, which takes place in five rounds occurring over the course of the school year, Harker currently sits at fourth place among the 55 schools in the Redwood Region, and seventh place nationally. Sophomores Patrick Lin, Cindy Liu and Andrew Zhang are among the top individual contests in the Redwood Region, tied with the other top scorers at 14 points. At the national level, Varun Mohan, grade 11, has 12 points and David Lin has 11.
At the fourth annual Math Prize for Girls Contest in September, held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cindy Liu, Nitya Mani and Suzy Lou, all grade 10, received Honorable Mentions for their performance. As they were among the top 44 students in the contest, all three students were later invited to compete in the 2012 Math Prize for Girls Olympiad.
In July, Michael Kwan, grade 7, participated in the International Math Contest in Taiwan and won the Individual Merit Award and two runner-up team awards. Kwan was eligible for the contest after competing in two qualifying rounds in February and April and completing a 12-week training course. The contest had 588 entrants from 28 countries.
Taking a short break from algebraic theories, a group of middle school math students took time out at the end of the school year to create a giant dome.
Students in mathematics teacher Margaret Huntley’s Algebra 1 class built the impressive, huge geodesic dome in about half an hour, with assistance from other students who helped roll out newspaper beforehand in preparation.
The class dome construction project was not part of the regular curriculum. According to Huntley it was something she had done previously as a geometry teacher and now served as a “bit of mathematical fun at the end of the year.”
Using 65 sheets of newspaper and some masking tape, the students based their dome on the work of famed inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, who pioneered the use of geodesic domes as houses.
“It was great to see the students all working together to create something so amazing out of pieces of newspaper. I think at the start they didn’t really believe it would work and seeing it take shape was great.”
Even though it wasn’t related to the algebra curriculum, Huntley elaborated that it helped students see and appreciate the beauty of math. “Seeing the reactions of my other classes as they walked in was pretty cool, too. The students took turns doing their review for finals in it. I like to think that it’s better studying math in a dome!” she added.