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Severn Math Team Finds the Winning Formula

The Severn Math Team concluded the competition season with four 1st place team wins and one 2nd place finish, cementing their overall championship within the annual Anne Arundel Community College High School Math Competition. 
Additionally, three Severn students earned individual honors, with Jeffrey Huang ’23 earning 5th place for the season, James Crabtree ‘23 coming in 3rd place, and Chris Fan ‘23 finishing 1st place overall amongst all individual competitors, with 28 total points. 

A total of 17 teams were in contention this season, which began in October, and includes one Saturday morning competition a month through March. Competition day included both individual and team rounds. During the individual round, each student works through 6 challenging questions in a 30-minute period, without a calculator. Once time is up, the students gather together to compare solutions. 

After the individual portion, the team’s co-captains – having surveyed and assessed the team members’ answers -- divide all participants into four teams, in part based on the results of the first part of the competition. The goal for them is to create teams whose skills are complementary. Then teams are entered into the A, B, C or overflow divisions for the team competition, which is the second portion of the event.  During the team session, students again have 30 minutes to solve 6 problems, though this time they are working together and may use a calculator.  The winner is determined by taking the highest team score and adding that to the average score of the top 3 individual students.
 
Any Upper School student can join the Math Team, and they routinely brought 20-25 students to these competitions.  Teams competing in A, B, or C have five members each, and any student not placed on one of those teams participates as part of the overflow team. That team’s score is not counted, but the students gain the experience of working through the same problems as everyone else. 

Co-Captains Jeffrey Huang ’23 and Chris Fan ’23 are thrilled that the team won the AACC competition, but even more excited about the positive momentum they’re seeing and the overall growth of the club. “It’s great to win, but we do this because we love it and we want others to see that Math Team is fun,” said Huang. 

“We both really like to do math, and we want other students to enjoy it as well,” added Fan. “The goal here wasn’t just to win, but to make math more accessible.”
 
“This is really an amazing group of kids,” said Jim Greenlee, Upper School Math Teacher and Coach of the Math Team. “It’s so awesome to see how excited they get about doing math for non-school credit on a Saturday morning.” Deiniol Hughes, Upper School Math Teacher, also helps to coach the Math Team. 

The team extended this extracurricular activity to the Middle School last year by creating and scoring an individual contest for students in 6th, 7th and 8th grades, and they plan to do so again in this academic year.  
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