Written by Miranda Wang (Class of 2028)
Photos by Ms. Wang

Part I
For this year’s MathCounts competition, eight Junior High students participated in the competition. Aarya Desai, Sarah Park (Class of 2029), Estelle Ooh, and Miranda Wang (Class of 2028) formed a team to compete in the team round, while Melody Yu (Class of 2029), Alysha Seng, Sage Nguyen, and Ella Ng (Class of 2028) participated as individuals. Contestants started preparing for this competition in September, and met various types of questions and challenges. We went to Santa Rosa for the competition, and the team got third place. We have to say that many of the contestants were really well prepared and experienced. For the school competition, Aarya Desai got first place and Miranda Wang got second place. Congratulations to all the contestants and the winners! 

Part II
Our MathCounts Team has got the qualification to go into the state competition. This time, our destination is much further than the first time-we are going to Harker Middle School in San Jose for it! Our coaches, Mr Li and Ms. Wang trained us more frequently these days. We had to do the questions during every meal offering, and we worked mostly on quadratic equations and possibilities, although possibilities are not in our Algebra 1 range. We heard from Mr. Li that this time, the mathletes will be more well prepared and the difficulties of the questions will be much harder, so we must learn more to have a basic concept of the questions. Before the trip, Laoshr made us burgers, dumplings and packed some apples for us for dinner. We drove for 5 hours and we even played Monopoly in the hotel before the competition day. During the competition day, we saw that there were 52 teams in total! Wow. I saw that most of the people are Asians. The questions were quite hard! We literally got 0 points for the team round…Well, it is quite expected that we couldn’t get any prize at all. We must work harder on math! For dinner, we ate hot pot, and we spent another 5 hours getting back. We had fun on the trip!