Competition encourages teamwork, math skills
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Students from several counties in the Pee Dee battled it out Friday Feb. 24 during the 21st Technical Mathematics Competition hosted by Florence-Darlington Technical College. There were eleven teams, with four members each, three hours and a lot of calculations before winners were crowned.
Two schools from Florence School District One, West Florence High School and Wilson High School, took home the first and second place wins.
Trinity-Byrnes Collegiate School
Trinity-Byrnes Collegiate School took third place while Mayo High School for Math, Science and Technology brought home fourth.
Hartsville High School and Darlington High School placed sixth and seventh, respectively.
An example of the problems that students were given is: A guidance counselor is planning schedules for 30 students. Each student must take at least one foreign language. Sixteen students say they want to take French, 16 want to take Spanish and 11 want to take German. Five say they want to take both French and German and of these, three want to take Spanish as well. Five want only German and eight want only Spanish. How many students want French only?
Darlington High School
Darlington High mathematics teacher Heather Dyar said that the four students on her team were students who were dual-enrolled, meaning that they are already taking college courses at FDTC while completing their high school diploma.
Lee Phillips, a math instructor at FDTC, said that the tournament is a way to encourage students to get and stay interested in math.
“We usually host between 12 and 16 schools; we have eleven signed up this year so if everyone shows up we’ll have around 45
students,” Phillips said. “We run things team-oriented because that is how real mathematicians do things in the real-world; a lot of other competitions students are figuring it out on pencil and paper by themselves.”
As a former public school teacher, Phillips said it was fun to be involved with the competition again.
“I taught at schools in the area and I brought them to this competition before and now I work at Tech,” Phillips said. “One of our goals is just to get excitement about math going because all of us who teach math are super pumped about who many things you can do with it out in the world and the power that it has but some other people don’t get that. We give the students life-like problems to have some fun with math.”
Trophies were handed out at the end of the competition. The first, second and third place teams also walked away with $1,500; $1,000; and $500.