Emporia State University held their 50th math day this year and it was quite the event with many LHS students attending.
Teachers Matt Ellis and Emily Beecham took a group of students to competition this year. Due to short notice for the events, students did not have much time to prepare. Many students placed in their events, but more importantly, they had fun.
Many students described math day as a fun event to enjoy competing with other people who like math. While it is certainly fun to win, you don’t necessarily need to win math day to enjoy it.
Senior Marcus Souders, who has participated in math day for three years, felt confident he could succeed without preparation.
“I didn’t really prepare anything specifically for the competition. But in math days before, I’ve been pretty successful.” Souders said. “So I was pretty confident in my abilities to be somewhat successful at least.”
Souders won second place in the individual geometry event, and his peer Luci Macmillan got 24th place in the algebra event. Lawrence High’s KME Virtual Escape Room team with freshman Davian Copeland took home fifth place.
Sophomore Luci Macmillan participated in the team algebra event and the individual algebra event. She takes a laid back approach to math day, saying winning isn’t as important to her as math.
“I definitely could have practiced beforehand, or looked through last year’s notes. I just didn’t really think to do it,” Macmillan said. “That probably would have helped me overall honestly, it’s just for fun, I don’t see a lot of a point in taking extra time to study for something that I’m just doing for fun.”
Macmillan took the role of checking answers for her team event, but even on her own she enjoyed the process of checking and working through the problems.
“I personally thought it was pretty fun going through, doing the math, checking the solution, and if I came to a question that I didn’t know the answer to, because it’s multiple choice. I could just run through the different answers, plugging it back into the original equation” Macmillian said. “I found it pretty relaxing. but I could definitely see other people finding it stressful.”
Freshman Davian Copeland participated in the KME virtual escape room and the individual geometry event. Davian thinks math day can help prepare you for testing in math classes whether you’re interested in math or not.
“I definitely think it’s good to get the experience with that kind of environment for the people who aren’t,” Copeland said. “Aside from that, it can help you just get used to testing in general.”
Macmillan is someone who has always enjoyed math and definite answers rather than the open ended answers of english or history classes.
“It just feels like my brain works well with stuff that’s if this equals this, then this equals this, if this is this, then this is that, just going through steps,” Macmillan said. “I enjoy doing stuff that has a solution or I can prove that there is a solution as opposed to stuff, language arts class where, I have to, I have to have an answer and then I have to figure out which answer is the most correct.”
Souders described the scramble towards the end of the event.
“We were in second place most of the competition. But then as it got harder, we were making errors,” Souders said. “We were getting confused and other people seemed to be getting them right. So we did not end up placing as well as we probably should have.”
Every team works differently. The geometry event had roles for everyone, but Copeland’s team split the work evenly to be able to put it all together for the escape room.
“We split it up so we didn’t really work together on it. I don’t know how the other team events worked, but I assume they did something similar and just worked together on the more difficult problems.”
Even though Macmillan didn’t place in her events, like many students she is still glad to have participated.
“I was a bit disappointed. I didn’t place for anything unfortunately. But I was content with how I did. I didn’t do terribly I don’t think, but I didn’t place for anything. But overall, I enjoyed it.”
