Mathcounts or Science Olympiad?
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Anonymous
| DS is in 7th grade, has done SO for 2 years and has won medals at regional and state levels. He has not participated in any math competitions, but currently in Algebra 1 Honors. I don't know how time consuming Math Counts will be, but I know very well SO is very time consuming and he may not have time to do both. He is interested in both activities. Any advice? |
Anonymous
Mathcounts shouldn't be as time consuming as Science Olympiad. He should be able to do both. |
Anonymous
|
I'm not too familiar with Science Olympiad, but Mathcounts is a great program for exposing kids to interesting math problems. I don't think you should worry so much about how time consuming the activities are; the amount of time spent is mostly up to your child and how much effort/training he wants to put into it.
He should pick the one that interests him the most. If he doesn't know much or is not sure about Mathcounts, I highly recommend trying it out (do some free problems from prior year contests and see if he likes them and is enjoying new ways to look them). In terms of seriously training for competitions, Mathcounts can be extremely competitive. Depending on the middle school (e.g Carson, etc) the competition is so big in terms of the sheer # of students wanting to be on the team that it may even be really hard for him to make it past the school round. This is unfortunate because it can shut off kids interest for learning new things if they feel they cannot even compete at all. The really interesting Mathcounts problems are the State and National rounds, as they are more challenging (the School round generally contains pretty easy problems, and so does the Chapter round with the exception of a few problems). This link will prove helpful for learning more about Mathcounts: https://www.mathcounts.org/programs/competition-series/past-competitions |
Anonymous
| One more thing I should add, is since your son is just starting Alg1, he may initially have a hard time with many Mathcounts problems... don't worry too much, it's normal and with practice he can learn lots of new techniques and methods not normally covered in school. The benefit is that if someone can learn how to solve Mathcounts problems, he can find middle school math problems much easier by comparison... |
Anonymous
Thanks, PP. Good to know that Mathcounts can also help with school work. |
Anonymous
Agree that SO is more time consuming. But OP, check whether the students at his school are allowed to do both. At our elementary (which always did well in both competitions) there was a policy that students couldn't do both. Part of the reason was to keep the same kids from taking up most spaces on academic competition teams (so more could participate) and part of it was that the teachers advising the programs needed to hold their after-school sessions for SO and Math Counts on the same day at the same time, due to many other obligations. Since your child is in middle school there may be more staffing and less concern with spreading slots among kids; I just mention this so you and he don't assume he can do both. Possibly he can. Also--if he does go for both, be sure to check schedules now, not after he's selected for the teams. If a math competition and a SO competition will conflict, he won't be able to do both programs. It's vital to have all team members present at all events for both of these programs. He can always go for Math Counts this year and return to SO in years to come! |
Anonymous
| I would hope that the kids can see whether they make it onto the Mathcounts team before they have to decide which activity to do. I believe each middle school only has 10 possible team spots (4 team members + 6 individuals), and most of those spots will probably be 8th graders. |
Anonymous
| This is all assuming that they CAN join a Mathcounts team. My son is an 8th grader at Franklin HS and I was hoping they would put a team together. The coordinator stated they were not doing it this year. If you are not affiliated with a school team your child can't participate. |
Anonymous
| Sorry, I obviously meant Franklin MS not Franklin HS. |
Anonymous
This is a good point. Same applies to Science Olympiad--students must be part of a school team. I don't know how Math Counts organizes school teams, but in SO a team needs a faculty sponsor (team "coach") but parents often do much (in many cases, all)of the subject matter coaching in ES and MS. I would think that organizing a HS team would be simpler since in HS the expectation is that the students are doing prep on their own rather than with a parent volunteer coaching. Parents are still needed for a lot, though-materials, transport, etc. Parents who want SO in schools at any level--volunteer, if you want it to happen. Even if a teacher is listed as the coordinator or team coach, SO is a program that absolutely needs parent volunteers (or grandparents or other relatives or just great adults). Can't happen without them in ES and MS and they're still needed in HS. It's a fantastic program! |
Anonymous
We are in a different state, but our school does not allow parents to help with SO at all. It is a kid run and kid driven program. What are the parents doing in your program? |
Anonymous
Didn't specify which state I'm in...Is this ES, MS or HS? Is no-parent a formal rule by the state SO board or a rule your school team coach uses? It's fine to have a rule like that, I think. Different states have different rules and states can organize SO differently, within national rules. Even the events used can differ - states can run some of their own events that don't exist at the national competition. So it's not surprising that there are differences. In in our two schools, parents could volunteer to work with teams; please don't think the parents were doing actual expert subject "coaching" (didn't mean to give that impression above). But at ES and MS level, for instance, a parent might agree to be the point person for a two-student team studying for a written test, and would ensure that the two kids doing that topic were regularly getting together to research, checking that they were sticking to the rules, etc. Otherwise the one teacher-coach or maybe a few teachers would have had to oversee dozens of pairs every week. And SO is unpaid and voluntary for teachers in our state. On building events (where kids actually make things like mousetrap cars or gliders etc.), adults were NOT allowed to build on or even touch the devices or materials and everything had to by handled and built by students, but we did want an adult present if for instance a fifth grader is using a drill for the first time (real example)....There was no way at our ES that kids could build or store certain devices AT school. And no way at our MS that enough school staff could be present (because adults do have to be accompanying students inside school after hours) for all the after school/evening meetings, held in the school building, of many different two-student event teams. If teams are solely meeting during the school day at school, that's fine too, but it's harder to get things done that way. This is all several years ago, BTW. High school is very different and generally is just the teacher who is officially team coach, and the students. But parents still need to drive kids to competitions, help with team administrative tasks if needed, volunteer to help out at competitions etc. |
Anonymous
| If the goal is for the kid to have experience in competitions you can try Beestar's online competition. It isn't as time consuming and kids can complete the competition from their home. |