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Our Main Competitions
Our Main Competitions
There are many types of math contests available to middle schoolers, as desciribed below. The "registration is school-based" means that registration of teams or individuals is done once per school, so it needs to be coordinated through either the school (like AMC 8), or Math Team acting on behalf of the schools.
Annual National/Regional Contests (registration is school-based)
Big prestigious ones: Mathcounts (Jan-May), AMC 8 (Jan)
Regional: New England Math League (NEML) (Feb)
Online-Only: Purple Comet (Apr), AreteLabs' Math Madness Tournament (Fall)
Monthly Contests (registration is school-based)
National: Continental Math League (CML) (Oct-Mar), MOEMS (Nov-Mar)
Regional: Intermediate Math League of Eastern Mass (IMLEM) (Oct-Apr)
Local Saturday/weekend Meets (any group of 2-6 students can sign up)
Acton Boxborough Math Contest (ABMC) (April) [Also online versions in Nov & Dec]
Lexington Math Tournament (LMT) (May)
Belmont Math Hunt (May)
There are more than these.
Ottoson and Gibbs will conduct AMC 8 and any students can sign up.
Mathcounts is the only one where Math Team participation is required for you to take part.
We don't formally do any of the others, although we've done CML, Purple Comet and Math Madness in the past. Ottoson used to run NEML for all students.
We might pick up IMLEM's remote version in 2024.
IMLEM provides this page linking to other contests, but most of them are for high schoolers. This also lists math summer camps and math enrichment programs.
MATHCOUNTS
MATHCOUNTS
This is the big one. Math Team is the only way for you to qualify to represent your school in the Mathcounts Chapter contest.
Mathcounts has 4 levels of competition: school (January), regional/chapter (Feb), state (March), and national (May), with trophies, prizes, scholarship money, travel and even TV time at the highest levels.
Team Size
We can take up to 12 students per school to the Mathcounts Chapter (Regional) Contest in Medford, which usually happens on the first Saturday in February. Our plan is to take 4 from Gibbs, and 12 from Ottoson.
The top 4 in each school become the official team for the school's ranking. The other students compete as individuals. So, 8 of the 12 Ottoson students would compete as individuals.
Due to the number limitation, students have to qualify to make the Chapter team, via school contests and Math Team participation. These also help us determine which 4 students make up the official school team.
To be a candidate for the Mathcounts team, students must attend most Math Team practices, score well on practice tests, be supportive of teammates, and use Alcumus at home plus other assigned at-home work. All of these score points which determine your ranking.
Coach McIntyre will rank candidates in early-January and determine the teams based on the above criteria.
MATHCOUNTS Video Challenge
The video challenge is a creative way to enjoy math by making a funny video with 3 of your friends about a Mathcounts problem.
Teams that made the top videos used to go to the Mathcounts National Contest, but in 2023 they changed it to be part of their National Math Club with a less prestigious award structure.
Here are some past winners of the video challenge.
AMC 8
AMC 8
This is an annual national 40-minute, 25-question multiple-choice contest, conducted in schools across the country mostly on the same day in mid-January. About 100,000 students take it worldwide each January.
It can get the top scorers in to invitation-only math programs, but mostly is just a one-time test to see how you compare to others and to win some recognition. Another benefit is prep for high school versions.
It's in the same format as the AMC 10 and AMC 12 high school contests, which serve as initial steps in qualifying for the USA Math Team which competes in the International Math Olympiad (IMO), so it's a good way to get comfortable with those much higher stakes high school tests.
Other Contests
Other Contests
Some other major contests are AreteLabs Math Madness (Oct-Dec), CML (Nov-Mar), NEML (Feb) and ABMC (April). See details on those and a few others in the chart below.
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