My Experience of Coaching Mathcounts Math Contest Preparation Frank Ho BC certified math teacher Founder of Ho Math and Chess Learning

Cen tre Vancouver, BC, Canada This article is about comparing the MATHCOUNTS res ults of students whom I coached in 1999 and 2000, with different methods in a pr ivate learning centre - Ho Math and Chess. I feel the main reason of improvement s was due to different coaching methods used in these two years. Students want t o participate BC MATHCOUNTS as individuals may find this paper resourceful since individual participation is allowed in 20022003 in BC, Canada . In 1999, I had an opportunity to coach some students who came from a private sch ool (mainly from Vancouver Crofton school) and were interested in participating MATHCOUNTS, but were not able to because they could not get sponsored by a teach er from their own school. I got permission to organize them as the Vancouver Ho Math and Chess Learning Centre team. I trained them 2 hours a week starting from September until the week before the competition. How did I start to prepare them for the competition I had a quick glance at the 1999 MATHCOUNTS School Handbook and realized that there was a lot of work to be done to help these students perform well. These grade 8 mathletes had very stron g math background and some of them had advanced a level which was above their pe ers at school. This was an easy part of my training in the sense that they did n ot have weakness in their school math but the biggest challenge was how to speed them up to the competition level. I started training them by giving out Warm-Up and Workout problems contained in the MATHCOUNTS School Handbook. Based on my e valuation of the students' results, I would attempt to teach the concepts behind the problems so that they would understand better. But quickly I discovered tha t at the grade 8 math level, there was a lot of material in MATHCOUNTS beyond th eir ability. Being a first time coach, I realized that I need to have a good und erstanding of the scope of the problems covered in the MATHCOUNTS competition. T he MATHCOUNTS School Handbook is great for providing diversified problems for st udents to work on, but it is difficult for me to teach concepts required in solv ing these problems all at once since each Warm-Up or Workout covers a wide spect rum of concepts. I went through the entire 1999 problem index in the back of Handbook to find out what kinds of problems are included in MATHCOUNTS . My impression is there are problems which have not been covered in grade 8 and need to be taught. If I only gave students problems in Handbook, I knew that they would not do well in MATHC OUNTS for the reason there are some materials which they have not learned at sch ool. The first thing I did was to find out what they knew and what they need to learn. Using the Problem Index, I determined what areas need to be taught. In 19 99, I mainly used Handbook to try to group problems with the same subjects such as Algebra, Geometry, Number Theory etc. together. Most of the time, I used cut and paste method and handed questions to students. This teaching method was frus trating and I wanted to have a reference book so that I could concentrate my eff orts in teaching instead of cutting and pasting. While I was teaching I also sta rted to write down my own teaching notes. The second year (2000), I purchased a MATHCOUNTS Competition Database (1998 Edit ion, a collection of past competition problems from 1983 to 1998, School level t o Chapter, State, and to National level) from EducAide Software (The database in cludes both past competitions problems and Handbook problems). I started to take on my coaching method as a research project - I wanted to see if teaching stude nts in a structured way with organized subjects gathered from the previous MATHC OUNTS Competition Database would make any difference in scores. The feedback fro m students was the students liked the way my lecture was presented. Every week I presented with one or more subjects, and after the presentation stu dents would get chance to work on problems which I generated from the Database. Students' tests would be marked and I would go over problems which they could no

t get. The results between 1999 and 2000 are as follows Name Ranking (1999, 2000) Sprint (1999, 2000) Target (1999, 2000) Andrea 23, 13 7, 17 8, 14 Meghan 16, 15 11, 17 8, 14 Matthew 13, 6 9, 21 12, 16 Olivia 27, 21 8, 18 4, 10 Matthew 18, 9 10, 20 8, 14 It shows that students made tremendous progress in the second year, with two of my students placing in the top 10 list. MATHCOUNTS Competition Database gives me the power to have an excellent historical overview on the depth and knowledge l evel of problems. I was able to use the Database combined with my knowledge of w hat students would have learned in school math classes to create a workbook whic h I think would help students do well in math competitions. The goal of the seco nd year was to analyze what a grade 8 student need to know for the possibility t o get on the top 10 list in MATHCOUNTS. I mainly used the competitions Database to do the work. I went through each chapter in Database and analyzed each questi on to see how complex the problem is and if students need to be taught for the c

oncept required to solve the problems. This tedious task eventually leads to my publishing of a workbook - Math Contest Preparation. My analyses of the Database are as follows Arithmetic Students are expected to have acquired the math concepts covered in this section such as fractions, decimals, %, digits, place value, rounding, order of operati ons scientific notation etc. I taught students the radicals and exponents using grade 10 textbook. There are lots of continued fractions and to express as commo n fractions. I showed students how to use the Euclidean Algorithm to create the continued fractions so students would understand continued fractions better. The re are many contest questions which are important to know, but I could not put t hem as one chapter. I collected all those important concepts together and went t hrough with students, examples such as changing a repeating decimal to a fractio n, base conversion etc. One of the difficulties that I encountered in coaching M ATHCOUNTS is the VOCABULARY and FORMULAS section in MATHCOUNTS School Handbook. The list is representative of terminology used in the problems. The list is long and I had managed to teach all terminology listed. AdChoices Algebraic Expressions & Equations Factorial Since the knowledge of factorial is required in combination and permutation, I h ad introduced factorial, combination and permutation to students and encouraged them use these knowledge in solving probability problems. Trinomial factoring Example Find the trinomial a perfect square . Sum and Product problem What is the positive difference between two integers who se sum is 30 and whose product is 221 I used the grades 9 and 10 factor problems to train students so that they could factor trinomials using the cross-multiplication in intuitively way. (I gave min imum 200 such questions to work on.) . Absolute-value equation I created a table which gives summary of different Absolute-Value Models. Inequalities One or 2 variables inequality equations. Systems graphing This area is difficult for me to coach since most of the students do not have an y knowledge in terms of graphics of parabola, absolute-value equation, and slope etc. I had to use the grade 10 book to teach slope, and the basic knowledge of transformation, graphing of inequality. The best way of covering these concepts is to use the real contest data in MATHCOUNTS I used the Database to produce que stions for students to work on after my presentation. Functions Used the questions in Database after my presentation.

Exponents Used the exponents in grade 10 to train students. Miscellaneous problem-solving Coin or natural number problems, Sum and difference problems, Traveling (with cu rrent or without), work problems etc. with multi-methods are offered for differe nt types of problems. Geometry

The geometry in MATHCOUNTS covered many areas and I have found the best way of c oaching is to produce those problems from Database. The concept of slope (WU 124, WU 16-2) and distance (WU 4-2) between 2 points are normally covered in grade 10, so I decided to use the materials in grade 10 to teach. Other important con cepts such as the relationship of lines, space diagonal, side lengths and angles of triangles are taught in grade 10 but is useful in MATHCOUNTS, so they were t aught to students. Number Theory

MATHCOUNTS is very heavy in counting shapes or paths. If these problems do not a ppear in the competitions, they may appear in the countdown. Number theory forms the foundation of having a good math contest preparation. Counting shapes, divi sibility, primes, trailing zeros, GCF, LCM, remainders, counting paths, modular arithmetic were all taught. I emphasized the POP (Product Of Prime) method to so lve the # of factors problems. The relationship between POP and the # of factors is not mentioned in school textbooks. For defined operations, counting systems problems, I also used Database. Probability and statistics

I used the textbook to introduce the basic concepts of mean, median, mode, range , and frequency, I also used the questions from Database on data interpretation. General mathematics I decided to teach the students to the level of grade 1011 algebra math. As a re sult it pretty much covered the section of general mathematics Summary After 2 years of training students, I discovered that by teaching students the c oncepts required in MATHCOUNTS, students appreciated more and gained confidence in participating. My goal of teaching them the knowledge required to do well in MATHCOUNTS was achieved by offering them chance of learning these concepts in a well-organized and structured way. P.S.

Please note that this article was written in 2001 and perhaps much information a nd MATHCOUNTS format have changed a lot but I feel that my training method is st ill applicable. I trained my own son Andrew to be the youngest Canadian chess ma ster when he was 12 and later he became a FIDE chess master. The subjects of tra ining in chess or math are different but the principle of methodology is more or less the same. By comparing the training methods of teaching both chess and mat h, I concluded one effective factor that will surpass any training methods one w ould ever find that is the training itself has to be altruistic. There were many nights that I could not sleep well because I was still dreaming on how to find a way to overcome Andrew's weakness. There were numerous times th at I was frustrated because I could not find a way on how to raise my students' math ability. From my personal coaching experience I can say that when one coach really puts in 100%, no 200% into helping children then their performance will be a big surprise. Those students whom I coached earlier including my own daughter were still in my mind and my learning center has since evolved into the international stage. Man y of my earlier workbooks had been tested on them, so I would like to thank all of you. The workbook Math Contest Preparation is now not sold publically but only throug h Ho Math and Chess franchisees. My dedication on math and chess teaching resear ch has allowed me to create the Geometry Chess Language (Canada copyright number 1069744), Frankho chess maze, Ho Math and Chess Teaching Chess Set. February, 2008 More information on my workbook Math Contest Preparation can be found at www.elementarymathworksheets.org. November, 2009