This year the ARML Power Contest provided an extremely young and rapidly improving Alabama ARML team a chance to cut its teeth on some team solution writing events.

Round 1 was a great confidence booster for the team, which finished with 33/40 points — just outside the top teams in the country, even though one of the easy problems was misread and unchecked due to the small size of the team.  The result was impressive for a group of students that included just one senior and no juniors (if I recall correctly).  It’s almost hard to believe that Alabama ARML scored 12/40 on the first round for the two previous years.

The second round was more interesting in many ways.  The lone senior and team captain, Xinke Guo-Xue, was unable to participate due to the flu.  That left a team of mostly 8th, 9th, and 10th graders (and just two juniors) to contend with a problem that required a lot of mathematical maturity without their team leader.  They managed 24/40 points.  They scored 22/26 through the first 7 problems.  While their team captain almost surely would have propelled the team to one of the top scores in the country (it was a great topic for Xinke), it was great to see so many young students throwing a tremendous amount of energy at a new set of concepts.  Their result is even more impressive given how many of them had little or no experience with analytic geometric (much less non-Euclidean geometry!).

Fortunately two students from Huntsville made it to Birmingham for the second round, though the Grissom students did not compete with us this time.  I may hold the contests on weekends next year and try to gather a larger group.  I would also like to see Montgomery students start to join us.  Alabama ARML is on its way to becoming a very competitive team.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Alabama, ARML, Competitions, Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.