Congratulations Math Team!

Aishani Ghosh and Sriraaga Chillara

 

 

On January 12, our Math Team won first place for Gibbons in our division! During the Math Meet, the math team worked hard, earning five perfect scores! Congratulations to the five perfect score winners: Kaden Chen, Soham Patil, Abhiruph Sitha Raman, Sahil Thadani, and Sri Aditya Vaddadi.

The Math Meet is split up into two parts, the individual rounds, and the team round. In the individual rounds, Gibbons scored 148 points! During the individual rounds, our ten scorers worked hard to achieve first place in our cluster. Out of the multiple different schools who participated in our cluster, cluster nine, Gibbons won with 180 points, beating second place by more than 60 points!

 

After the Meet, we asked Mrs. Shaughnessy, the Math Team teacher, and some students about the best parts of Math Team. Mrs. Shaughnessy says that she loves to see students working together and solving challenging math problems. Making sure to get everyone a chance to go to the Math Meet is hard, but she does it! 

 

The best thing about the Math Team is the social aspect and watching the kids working together getting a chance to participate in math they like. I make sure everyone gets a chance to go to a Math Meet. It’s amazing to see everyone get to have fun and grow with math.

— Mrs. Shaughnessy

 

Our second interviewee, Shriyaa Madanlal, said her favorite part about Math Team is solving problems with peers. For her, the hardest part about the Math Team is understanding the problems and figuring out how to solve them.

Just like Shriyaa, Disha Kumar says her favorite part is also the people and her friends who are in the team. In her opinion, the hardest part about Math Team is the number theory round in the Math Meets.

Moving on, we interviewed Gauthami Sreedhar. She likes the competition involved in the Math Team. The hardest part about the Math Team for her is the tryouts, since the problems are often challenging and mind-provoking.

Our last interviewee is Sudevi Ghosh. Her favorite part about is getting to compete with the other schools and her friends. She likes that she can compete with the other schools in real time, however she hopes to go in-person once it’s safe.

 

About the Math Team:

The Math Team meets every Tuesday, after school. Topics range from geometry, to algebra, and even number theory. All the practice leads up to the Math Meet. The Math Meet happens about once every month. Tryouts take place before the Math Meet. The top ten highest scorers in the tryout become the scorers for the upcoming Math Meet. Also, ten alternates are chosen at random, so that everyone has a chance to go to a Math Meet.

Ten scorers and ten alternates compete in the Math Meet until 5:30. The Math Meet has categories which include mystery, geometry, number theory, arithmetic and algebra, all in that order. As students solve these problems, students from other schools do so too, at the same time. In the past, the Math Team would travel to the other school to take it all in-person. However, this year, because of the pandemic, it had to stay virtual and students stayed in their own school.

 After the individual round, there is a team round. The Westborough team is divided into two teams for the team round; alternates and scorers. After the team round, the scores of the team round are added up with each of the individual scores. The total score of our school is compared with the other schools. In this Meet, we won 180 points, total!

 

Congratulations again to the GMS Math Team for working so hard to earn us first place!