World Math Day: Total Crazy Fun


... our school is pitching in, along with thousands of others (in 2008: 20,000 or so schools participated), to do mental arithmetic over 2 standard Earth days (World Math Day spans 48 hours, due to the overlapping nature of "days" as the sun goes round the Earth).

At 2:25 PST, the world student body had correctly answered just under 377,000,000 problems, smashing last year's record 186 million.

There are 12 hrs, 34 minutes left, so my earlier (yesterday) prediction of half-a-billion correct solutions is within grasp, I think.

Both high school students and middle-school students had a ball. Occasionally, the students figured out that if they entered the game pool at the same time (25-30,000 students at any given time), they had a chance to play each other head-to-head. Those were the best times, and the rivalries were vociferous and yet good-natured.

Best line of the day: a student leaping up out of his chair, triumphantly yelling, "I BEAT THE CHINESE!!!"

*** UPDATE ***

452,682,682! This is WMD's 3rd year, with a trend of 10 million, 186 million, 452 million. So I'm pretty sure our school will be back again in 2010 to participate and see what sort of result we can get... 500 billion is definitely do-able; is 1 trillion within reach?




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Posted by WryMouth at 4 Mar 2009, 2:20 PM
Categories: Astonishing Tales,Give Peace a Chance,Mathematics,World Events

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