The University of Wisconsin-Superior Mathematics and Computer Science Department recently welcomed 100 students from eight high schools throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota for its annual High School Mathematics Meet.

The event, which took place in the Yellowjacket Union Great Room, gave students the opportunity to compete individually and as teams to solve problems in geometry, calculus, algebra, trigonometry, probability and statistics.

“I was really looking forward to the team events,” said Maria Wiita, a senior from Northwestern High School in Maple, Wisconsin, who has attended the event once previously. “This year I’m on our scoring team [for the competition] and I was really excited to see the problems. I’ve taken a lot more math classes, so I felt a lot more prepared.”

The team aspect of the competition is an aspect many students aren’t able to experience in their high school classes.

“Working with my friends to solve the problems – and some things that I’ve never seen before – but I was able to use a combination of the different math classes I’ve taken to solve the problems was really interesting,” said Wiita. “I also liked learning some new things about math, like different number systems that I didn’t know about before.”

Student teams are comprised of eight high school students and each team is accompanied by at least one teacher from their school.

“It’s nice to get a chance to interact with other high school teachers and it gives the chance for our students to challenge themselves,” said Brad Giesregen, a high school math teacher at Drummond High School for 30 years who has been bringing students to UW-Superior’s High School Math Meet every year that it has been available. “It’s intrinsic because they enjoy math, and they look at it as a challenge and after they leave here to talk about all the things they didn’t know. The drive to challenge themselves is big.”

Students were able to take a break from competition during an exciting Math Talk from Steve Rosenberg, UW-Superior professor from the Mathematics and Computer Science Department, on quaternions – a set of numbers that encode rotation in three dimensions and are helpful for modelling the pitch, yaw and roll of aircraft.

Following the Candy Bar Quiz with Jerad DeVries, UW-Superior senior lecturer from the Mathematics and Computer Science Department, which required students to quickly find the correct answer to a series of math questions to win a candy bar, the event concluded with lunch and an awards ceremony.

“It’s put a pep in my step,” said Wiita. “I was feeling a little senior slump. I took the statistics test today and I’m in a statistics math class now. When I go back to class I’m going to talk to my statistics teacher about what kind of problems we had, what we learned; so I’m really excited for the how I can see all the things I’ve learned play into real-world problems.”

Along with hosting the annual event, UW-Superior’s Mathematics and Computer Science Department also designed the competition format and writing the exams. The event has been held annually since the 1980s with the exception of 2020 due to COVID and in 2023 as the result of a winter storm.

“The feedback that we received is that this event ran well,” said Heather Kahler, teaching professor in UW-Superior’s Mathematics and Computer Science Department. “I was encouraged to see the determination on students’ faces to persevere when solving problems and the general excitement in the room.”