A team of Glasgow Middle School students are on their way to the national MATHCOUNTS competition in May to represent Louisiana.  The Glasgow Team won first place at the Louisiana State MATHCOUNTS Competition March 18 in Pineville.  All five of the school’s student team members placed in the top 12.  The team members are:  Elvin Gu, seventh grade; Mason Guillot, sixth grade; Louie Kam, seventh grade; and Scott Wu, eighth grade.

The top students -- Gu, Kam and Wu, along with the fourth-place state competition student from Alexandria -- will represent Louisiana at the 2011 Raytheon MATHCOUNTS National Competition May 5-8 in Washington, D.C.  The top four Mathletes from each state advance to the national event.  This will be the third year Wu has been a member of the state team and the second year for Gu. At last year’s national competition held in Orlando, Wu placed seventh in the nation.

The Woodlawn Middle School MATHCOUNTS Team placed second in a field of eleven private and public middle schools at the February 18 Regional MATHCOUNTS Competition.  At the state level, the team placed seventh in a field of 24 teams from Louisiana.  Woodlawn’s team members at both competitions were:  seventh graders Noah Broussard, Ryan Jennings and Eshan Joshi and eighth grader Aotian Zheng.  Westdale Middle School placed eighth and McKinley Middle School placed sixth at the regional competition, as well.

The MATHCOUNTS Competition is a national middle school coaching and competitive mathematics program that promotes mathematics achievement through a series of fun and engaging "bee" style contests.  The program exists in all 50 states plus U.S. territories and the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. State Department schools and is supported by the National Society of Professional Engineers at the state and local levels.  Public, private, religious and home schools are eligible to participate as long as students are in the sixth, seventh or eighth grades.

Examples of MATHCOUNTS problems include:
• If Kenton walks for 60 minutes at the rate of 3 miles per hour and then runs for 15 minutes at the rate of 8 miles per hour, how many miles will he travel?
• If a fly is buzzing randomly around a room 8 feet long, 12 feet wide and 10 feet high, what is the probability that, at any given time, the fly is within 6 feet of the ceiling? Express your answer as a common fraction.

For more information, contact Glasgow Middle School’s Joan Moroney at (225) 925-2942 or jsumerlin@ebrschools.org or the national MATHCOUNTS office’s Archana Mehta at (703) 299-9006 (Ext. 108) or archana@mathcounts.org.