WASHINGTON -- Mike Edwards, 13, an eighth grader from the Kinkaid School in Houston, won the first national championship in the 'Mathcounts' program Saturday by 'just explaining the facts' in the final rounds.
The contest involved 192 seventh and eighth graders -- 26 of them girls -- who had outscored schoolmates at the state and local levels and got expense-paid trips to Washington for the finals.
The program started in Chicago three years ago as part of an effort to help students in inner-city schools do better in mathematics. By last fall, more than 400,000 students nationwide were involved in 'Mathcounts' exercises. An estimated 16,000 competed in regional competition and 3,200 went to state semi-finals.
Edwards, an articulate math whiz, won by correctly solving 59 of 64 problems on paper and orally presenting his solution to a complex question to a panel of mathematics experts Saturday.
Was he intimidated?
'They didn't tell us they were Ph.Ds,' he said. 'As it was, I was just explaining the facts.'
There also was a winning four-member team. The captain, Alex Barry, 14, of Langston Hughes Intermediate School in Reston, Va., had been the Virginia state champion. Two of his teammates -- Eric Prestemon, 14, and Gordon Bellamy, 13, also are from Langston. The fourth is Sarah Hung, 14, of Longfellow Intermediate in Falls Church, Va. Their coach, Joan Armistead, is a former high school math teacher.
Edwards explained how he got into the program:
'I've been interested in math since very early and I partriciated in a number of math programs,' he said. 'Our math teacher (at Kinkaid) managed to drag me down with all the other students in the eighth grade and have them take the original 40-question test. The top scorers on that test would be tutored and we'd weed out until we got four for the team.
'It's been pretty interesting, especially the places we've gone and the people we've seen.'
As for the future, he said, 'I'm trying to keep my options open. Engineering sounds interesting.'
Expenses for the contest are paid by the National Society of Professional Engineers and the CNA Insurance firm.
All 192 finalists ended the day at a banquet where astronaut Joe Engle was a featured speaker. The top winners and their coaches also will be guests of NASA at the June 19 space shuttle launch.
