On Tuesday, January 11, the Sant Bani School Math Team participated in the second Lakes Region Middle School Mathalon of the winter trimester. When the final team scores had been tallied, SBS emerged with its second victory in as many competitions this year, earning 112 points to finish first out of the 12 participating schools.
The Swans also finished atop the leaderboard after the first competition on November 17.
All middle school students are able to join the Math Team. The group practices during Enrichment throughout the week to prepare for competitions. Typically, all participating schools would convene in one location for competitions, but during the COVID-19 pandemic the competitions are done virtually with scores being logged in a spreadsheet.
Competitions consist of six categories: Arithmetic, Concepts, Geometry, Pre-Algebra, Word Problems, and Team. For the first five categories, a group of four participants is tasked with individually solving three problems in 10 minutes; each problem is worth a different amount of points. At the conclusion of the 10-minute timeframe, a judge scores the four worksheets and adds the cumulative point total, which constitutes the team’s score for that category. In the final category, Team, the group of four works together to solve each problem.
The Sant Bani School team fared exceptionally well in Tuesday’s competition, accumulating the highest number of points in five of the six categories.