Tuesday, April 15, 2014

This Week's Work : Week 47 - for Inquisitive Young Mathletes

This week, we'll continue discussing this year's Mathcounts state harder problems.
Please try these problems before our lesson.

Review sprint round questions we went over at last Sunday's lesson, especially #18 to see if you can
get that question right and fast the first try.

The technique used for this question is very similar to the first explanation from this episode of
Mathcounts mini -- more construction counting.

Review Binomial Theorem and see if you can use the following concepts solving this year's
state sprint # 28. (You can also use modular arithmetic, or mod.)

Chapter 14: The Binomial Theorem
Have a calculator ready for target and team round questions.

Take care and happy problem solving !!

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

This Week's Work : Week 46 - for Inquisitive Young Mathletes

Finally, this year's Mathcounts state problems are clear for discussions.

Check that out here !! We'll talk about those harder problems this week at our group lessons.

Please let me know how you did/what scores you got if you have followed this blog.
So far, there were a few states' top 10, 20, etc.. and two students I met online will go to the Nationals.

Some e-mails make my day and definitely make me more productive.

Thanks a lot in advance.

For this week's work :

If you haven't watched this video, do so this week.

Joint Proportion : In the video, three methods are discussed and as you can see, the last method is much, much
faster so try that to see if you fully understand the relationship now and can implement it on new, seemingly hard
problems.

We'll continue working on some rate, proportion questions (the harder ones) at our lessons besides reviewing and
practicing speed to solve other harder, counting/probability and geometry questions.

New Mathcounts Mini : Recognizing Squares and Solving a Simpler Problem

From TED Talk : The Magic of Fibonacci Numbers presented by Arthur Benjamin