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Lowellville pupils take on the world
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Lowellville 3rd grader Jessica Grow competes in world Math Day event at her school Wed.
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Lowellville 3rd graders Kyle Baird, left, and Nick Kacir prepare for World Math Day event at their school Wednesday.
LOWELLVILLE — In preparation for a global math challenge, third-graders at Lowellville Elementary School were told “Get your fingers all worked up,” by third-grade teacher Laraine Matisi.
The pupils were in a race against time, competing with students from around the world during the 24-hour World Math Day multiple-country competition Wednesday.
Students created cartoon characters to represent themselves for the online competition, which matched up kids from more than 80 countries.
The contest goal is to have more correctly answered questions than the previous year’s total. Last year, pupils around the globe answered more than 182,455,000 math problems correctly, said Liz Cavalier, a math teacher for grades 3 to 6 at Lowellville.
“It’s really interactive for the students,” she said of the program.
“It’s improving their mental math skills and teaching them geography as well,” Cavalier said, noting that the pupils are shown a map locating their competitors’ countries.
Cavalier learned of the World Math Day competition while teaching at a bilingual school in Berlin, Germany, and introduced it to Lowellville this year.
“It’s tying in beautifully with our cultures studies,” Matisi said.
When the kids began the challenge, there were more than 44,000 pupils signed on from countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Singapore and more.
“India, I got one from India,” said 9-year-old Madison Warren of one of her competitors.
Her twin brother, Nathanael, was sitting two seats away facing pupils from the United Kingdom and Italy.
“I came in second,” Madison shouted.
“So far, I’ve only been in second too,” Nathanael responded.
The pupils participated in 60-second rounds filled with addition and subtraction problems. In each round, they faced three competitors.
“They’re so excited,” said another third-grade teacher, Theresa Iudiciani.
“It’s basic facts, but they are excited about the competition,” she said.
The kids were answering about 30 questions per round, and their fingers clicked the keyboards vigorously.
“I get different scores each time,” said 9-year-old Logan Macovitz.
Logan wasn’t taking any breaks in between rounds and was anxious to learn where his opponents were from.
“Cayman Islands,” he said. “I haven’t raced someone from the Cayman Islands yet.
“Someone from Singapore had 64,” Logan said. “I have to beat that. I have to.”
“Logan says those UK kids are tough,” Matisi said.
“Yes, they are,” Nathanael said to himself while working on his questions.
His strategy of saying the answers aloud seemed to keep him in a rhythm, “Six,” click, click; “one,” click click.
Friends, Cassie Marsicola, 9, and Marissa Lellio, 9, were sitting next to each other comparing competitors and scores.
Cassie was consistently winning first place, and Marissa was yielding similar results.
“My hands hurt,” said Marissa who had her sleeves rolled up. “It’s really fast,” she said.
“Come on, Marissa,” encouraged Cassie.
“Don’t cheer for me; I need to concentrate,” Marissa said, laughing.
Both girls agreed that the best part of the challenge was competing against pupils from around the world and learning about where the countries were located.
After the third-graders were finished, more than 250,000 questions had been answered correctly across the globe.
“You’ve answered 1,154 questions correctly,” said Mrs. Matisi to Logan more than halfway through the competition and after he played 44 rounds.
“Holy cow,” he responded.
“I was going to say try and make it a goal to hit 1,000, but you’ve already done it,” Matisi said, encouraging him to shoot for 1,500.
Logan ended with 1,330 correctly answered questions and played 54 rounds.
“The best part was that I almost got to my major goal of 1,500,” said Logan of the world math problem face-off.