GMS math team repeats as state titlist

Members of the Greencastle Middle School Jr. Academic Super Bowl Math Team that won the 2012 Class 2 State Championship recently include (front, from left) Sean Ramey, Kelly Hansen, Lily Spencer, Katie Rose Parsons and Yugi Mozawa; (back, from left) coach Jane Roberson, Mattia Seaman, Colin Dombrowski, Zach Wilkerson, Sam Savage and coach Gayle Hansen. Not pictured is Nicholas Seaman. In the photo, the team is standing in front of a large Pascal's Triangle that coach Roberson has outside her classroom door at GMS.

The Greencastle Middle School Jr. Academic Super Bowl mathematics team won the Class 2 State Championship Saturday, April 28 by correctly solving 20 out of 25 problems.

In doing so, GMS successfully defended its state title from last year.

Fifty-six teams from across Indiana competed in Class 2 in the Indiana Jr. Academic Super Bowl. Besides winning Class 2, GMS placed fifth out of all 231 teams that competed on Saturday.

"These students have dedicated a lot of their time to this, coming in for practices twice a week at 7 a.m. for 2-1/2 months," coach Gayle Hansen said.

"The coaches have enjoyed working with these students that are eager to learn and study math," she added. "The math that these students have to learn for this competition is more advanced than what most middle schoolers study."

Topics this year included factoring polynomials, which is from Algebra I; topics from geometry such as the Pythagorean Theorem and trigonometric ratios; and number patterns such as Pascal's Triangle and the Fibonacci sequence.

Want to try out your knowledge? Here is one of the problems from the state finals: How many binomial factors are in the complete factorization of x32 - y32? Hint: Think difference of 2 squares. (Answer is 6.)

Coach Hansen would like to give credit to all of the teachers in the primary and intermediate schools who have provided the math foundation upon which the students and coaches were able to build.

She also would like to give credit to the Tzouanakis' Intermediate M.A.T.H. Bowl coach, Brad Phillips, who coached these students when they did M.A.T.H. Bowl at Tzouanakis. He made studying for math competitions fun and his teams have consistently done well, Hansen said.

Another big thank you goes to Mike VanRensselaer, she said, "for the wonderful teaching of Honors Algebra I and Honors Geometry that he has done at the Greencastle Middle School."

In addition to Math, Jr. Academic Super Bowl consists of teams in English, Science, Social Studies and Interdisciplinary.

The GMS Interdisciplinary team placed eighth in the state. Members of the team are Lily Spencer, Zach Wilkerson, Kelly Hansen, Mattia Seaman, Sam Savage, Nicholas Seaman and Colin Dombrowski. The Interdisciplinary team is coached by Suzanne Funk, Paige Tesmer, Amy Weliever, Roberson and Hansen.

Additionally, this past weekend out of the schools at area competition at Southmont, Social Studies took second in Cass 2, Science took third in Class 2, and English took third in Class 2.