Over 700 students join 1st round of Mathcourt competition

The Public School System had an overwhelming turnout in the first round of the yearly Mathcourt competition for the elementary division, with 770 participants registering for Saturday’s competition at Koblerville Elementary School.

Reo Arriola, Mathcourt coordinator for the K-5 division and vice principal of Dandan Elementary School, said that a total of 17 public and private schools participated in the preliminary rounds.

He disclosed that PSS has seen a steady increase in the number of schools and students that compete in Mathcourt every year. Just two years ago, the event had less than 400 participants. Since then, it has been constantly hitting over 700 students per meet.

Arriola said they expect to see an increase in both schools’ and students’ participation in the March competition because many missed the February meet deadline.

“We think interest in the competition is spreading through word of mouth, many schools are finding out the benefits of being exposed to challenging math questions based on CNMI standard and benchmarks, through healthy competition among schools,” he told Saipan Tribune.

Mathcourt has two divisions: K-5 and 6-12th grade divisions. Both divisions have two regular meets followed by regional competitions. The K-5 division always comes after the 6-12 division and is usually held in February to give K-5 students more time to be exposed to the benchmarks that will be used to come up with the test questions.

Unlike the 6-12th division, winners in the elementary contest will not compete in the national Mathcourt events, but Arriola said that PSS is looking into this option.

He described many students as “very motivated” and look forward to the competition.  Many schools, he added, have started training students early in the year in anticipation of these events.

“We try to make the competition more challenging each year, adding questions that not only test math fluency but also literacy as well,” he told Saipan Tribune.

According to him, all questions are formulated using the PSS standards and benchmarks as their guide.

“Our focus is to not only build math fluency but math literacy as well. We find many students being able to answer math computations, but as soon as we formulate questions into word form, they have a hard time figuring out what to do. Part of our goal is to make sure that students are familiar with math vocabularies [ex. quotient, relation symbols, etc.] as well as fluency, so they may incorporate their math knowledge into their everyday life and become life-long learners,” he added.