GFS Middle School Team Takes Second Place at Philadelphia MathCounts Competition

Every Friday, a group of 25 Middle School students spends their lunch working through difficult math problems, learning strategies and techniques to compete at the highest level as mathletes. Many of the participants choose to join MathCounts in pursuit of more challenging math problems and a team dynamic.

“The problems are fun, and you get to be with a lot of people who also enjoy doing math,” said Ryan Lu ’31. “Everything about it is friendly.” 

Phoebe Chen-Plotkin ’30 loves math and sharpening her skills (she plans to learn calculus this summer), and participated in MathCounts last year. She enjoys the style of questions that MathCounts give her the chance to practice, which are different from what she’s tackling in school math.

“I’ve started to like geometry problems where you have to draw other shapes in order to find certain distances or areas,” she said. “They’re kind of like a puzzle.”

The culminating competition, Philadelphia MathCounts, took place in February. Coaches Annabel Gorman and Matt Greenawalt ’02 (both math teachers) accompanied the team to the event, where 14 club members competed against students from around Philadelphia.

The competition consisted of a full day of math challenges, including a team-solving round and a countdown round in which the top-10 students went head-to-head to solve a problem faster than their competitors.

 Last year's GFS team bested their chief rivals Masterman, and qualified for the statewide competition. This year’s team, led by four seventh grade students, finished second to Masterman, and are poised to challenge for the top spot next year.

Seventh grader Ryan Lu bested multiple competitors in the Countdown round to finish third overall, and sixth grader Max Su-Feng was the first place MathCounts mathlete in the city. Both will head to states in the coming month to continue to compete for the GFS team. 

As a sixth grader, this was Su-Feng’s first experience with MathCounts, although he has been practicing math competition-style problems since fifth grade. He said that in the competition, the difficulty of the problems ranged from “pretty easy” to middle-level to quite tricky. He credits the weekly MathCounts meet-ups at GFS with teaching him strategies to tackle problems quickly and efficiently. One of the best parts of the experience was the social aspect of being part of a team.

“I made a bunch of friendships through MathCounts,” he said. “We really felt like a team.”

In addition to Lu and Su-Feng’s victories, Maron Roosevelt ’30, Phoebe Chen-Plotkin ’30, George Pao ’31, Irene Zhao ’31 and Olivia Deng ’31 finished top 16, and Matthew Ma ’30, Nora Hossain ’30, Ella Simon ’32, Annalisa Chavez ’32, Evelyn Kuo ’32, Nemo Nguyen ’30, and Anderson Wang ’31 helped the GFS team place second.
 

Congratulations to all our Middle School mathletes!