The next ARML contest will be held Saturday May 30, 2009. We travel to Penn State on Friday May 29.
The Lehigh Valley team will have four teams of 15 people, the Fire, the Ice, the Lightning, and the Thunder. Selection for the teams is based on score on the Lehigh Contest, performance in practices, and scores on the AMC and AIME, and in MathCounts. Please contact Don Davis for more information. The team is open to anyone who will attend the practices which are held at Lehigh University most Sundays during the spring from 3:30 until 6:00. In recent years, this has included many students as far as 75 miles from Lehigh in all directions, including New Jersey. Although ARML consists of difficult questions in high school mathematics, we have found that talented middle school students can perform very successfully at ARML. In fact, the 2007 Lehigh Valley Fire team, which finished second in the country, included four eighth graders among its 15 members, and one of the two top performers on the 2008 Fire team was a 7th grader.
2007 T-shirt logos, front and back.
If on May 29 we have more than 60 people who want to go, then those not selected to one of the four teams can go as alternates. This means that you go with the rest of the team, wear the LV T-shirt, but participate on another team in need of another person, or go on a team of alternates from various areas. Many LV ARML members have gone as alternates in past years and enjoyed the experience.
Practices, held on Sundays, usually from 3:30-6 PM, will usually consist of working on old ARML contests. We will have one practice in October and one in November. Between mid-March and late May, we will have eight practices. Practices are held in Maginnes Hall, room 101. Maginnes Hall is located on the Lehigh University campus. It is best if you enter from Asa Drive, which is a tiny little street which parallels Packer Ave and Morton St, between them. If you turn into Asa Dr from Vine St, Maginnes will be the first building on the right, and there is a parking garage just across Asa Dr from Maginnes. Note that Asa Drive is unmarked; it looks mainly like an alley that takes you to the entrance to the parking garage. On Sundays, if you turn left inside the garage after entering it from Asa Drive, you should find staff or visitor spaces in which you can park. This only works on Sundays. Because of construction of a new Broughal Middle School, street parking on Vine St is not as plentiful as it used to be. You can also enter Maginnes from the Packer Ave side, but then you must look for a not-obvious set of stairs from the second floor lobby down to the first floor. This set of stairs is at the end of the second corridor going off the lobby to the right. Here is a map from Google, which by zooming should enable you to find Asa Drive.
Solutions to all problems considered during the practice will be handed out at the end of practice. Team members are expected to study those solutions during the following week, in order to obtain maximum benefit from the practice. We spend very little time during practice in actual instruction regarding the mathematics of the problems. We will hand out a "playbook" of formulas written by Ken Monks, which you should also study.
Advice about preparing for ARML, written by Ken Monks.
Practices begin and end promptly. Try to arrive early, especially if you wish to socialize with your teammates. Cookies and lemonade are provided. A lounge is provided for parents who drive their children to practice.
In recent years, no costs were borne by students. The primary sponsor of the team is Paul Martino, who graduated from North Penn HS in 1992 and Lehigh Univ in 1995. He founded several Silicon Valley companies, including tribe.net and currently AggregateKnowledge.com, and has made a substantial contribution to the LU Contest and LV ARML team. Other sponsors are Keystone Consulting Engineers, Lehigh University Department of Mathematics, and Buchart-Horn. Any corporation interested in sponsoring a portion of the expenses of the Lehigh Valley ARML team should contact Don Davis. We hope to obtain additional support in 2009.
We will travel to Penn State on Friday May 29 in buses chartered through Lehigh University, driven by professional bus drivers. We will meet at Lehigh University at 12:30. Sometimes students need to make other travel arrangements, for example, if they have a Friday afternoon or Saturday evening activity. We highly prefer that students go with the team, but they can drive (or be driven) late Friday or (very!) early Saturday, or can come with the team but have parents meet them at Penn State for a 3:00 departure on Saturday, if necessary. Several students did that in 2005 and missed out on being in the celebratory team picture.
Team members and coaches stay in a dormitory at Penn State, with two people in each room. There are separate dormitories for boys and girls. Beginning in 2009, we plan to institute a team rule of lights out by 11:00. We arrive at Penn State about 4:30 Friday afternoon. After registering, students go to their rooms to get rid of their belongings, and then the entire team and coaches will meet and walk downtown together and then break up into groups to go to dinner, which is in any of the many student-oriented restaurants along the street which adjoins Penn State's campus. It is more than a 1/2 mile walk from the dorm to these restaurants. There are hundreds of ARML participants going to these restaurants that evening. An ARML team member will need perhaps $5 for this dinner and $5 for a traditional stop at McDonalds on the way home.
After dinner, ARML students go back to the dorm and usually play cards or frisbee. There is also a popular math lecture at 8:00, which many of our team members have enjoyed in the past. Another activity is the ARML Song Contest. Between 3:00 and 4:00 Saturday, after the contest has finished and while final scoring is taking place, there are several activities to entertain the 1000 students in the auditorium. One of these is the song contest. Teams will have prepared songs about ARML or Math, usually to the tune of some pop song. On Friday evening, those who have done so have a preliminary screening, at which finalists are chosen. Finalists perform on stage Saturday afternoon. It is a fun, light-hearted, activity. In 2006 the LV team had two songs in the preliminary round Friday night, and one entry won the contest on Saturday.
It is imperative that students obey the curfew. In the early years of LV ARML, we had some disciplinary problems in this regard, but in recent years students have been quiet after midnight. Students should be well aware of the importance of a good night's sleep.
Breakfast Saturday is in a huge dining hall adjacent to the dorms. It is served from approximately 6:30 to 7:45. We all wear our LV ARML T-shirts and sit together at breakfast. This is the first opportunity to see all the other ARML teams in their T-shirts, which is quite exciting. Coaches will make sure that all students have gone to breakfast by about 7:00. The contest begins approximately 8:30 in a building about a 1/2 mile walk from the dorm. We gather outside the dorm about 8:00 to walk to our contest building. Each team of 15 will work the Team Questions and Power Questions together in their classroom, with a proctor waiting outside the room, giving them their materials and keeping time for them. The Team Questions require 20 minutes and the Power Questions 60 minutes. Each team will have a Captain, whose responsibility it is to make sure that all questions are answered.
After the Team and Power questions, all students go to the huge Bryce-Jordan Pavilion for the Individual Questions. There are four rounds of two questions each, with 10 minutes for a round. The correct answers are announced after each round, and after the third and fourth rounds it is very exciting to see if any LV team members are among the handful of people who say they have answered all questions correctly (or all but one). After this, everyone rushes off for lunch in the huge dining hall, and compare notes on how many individual questions they answered correctly. The breakfast and lunch costs are covered by the room and board fee that is now covered by our sponsor, the Martinos.
After lunch, we go back to Bryce-Jordan Pavilion for the last round, the Relays. Each 15-person team is divided into five groups of three. Each group of three does the same thing. The first person has a question to answer and the second and third have questions which say something like "Let x=TNYWR. Perform some tricky calculation depending on x." TNYWR means "The number you will receive." They should be thinking about how to work their problems before they receive x, which is passed from the previous person. Only the third person's answer counts. You have six minutes to do it, and get double credit if you can do it in three minutes. There are two rounds of this. This is what won us the national championship in 2005.
After the relays, we wait for at least an hour for the grading to be finished. There is a SuperRelay of 15 people, which doesn't count in the scoring. There is the Song Contest mentioned above. And there are the Tie Breaker questions for the individual championship. Students who got all 8 right (or if no one accomplished that, then those who got 7 right) go to the front of the room to see who can be the first to hand in a correct answer to a question which is placed on a screen for everyone to see. The same thing is happening simultaneously in Iowa and San Jose/Las Vegas. Another thing is that they announce the person or persons on each team who answered the most Individual Questions correctly, not including those who won national awards.
Finally they announce the winners, and then we pick up a packet with the results, go back to the dorm, pack up, load up the bus, and ride back to Lehigh, with a stop at McDonalds along the way. We arrive home about 9:30 PM. In recent years, we have used cellphones to let students' parents know exactly what time we expect to arrive.
What do students need to take to ARML? A calculator for use in the Team and Power questions, several sharp pencils, perhaps some blank paper to use as scrap paper (the amount provided there is often inadequate), a pillow and blanket, which they do not provide (they do provide sheets), towel and other bath items, and $10-15 for the two evening meals. A rain jacket is often worthwhile, because it seems that there is often cold rain there, and long walks are obligatory. Students' parents must fill out a permission slip which should be returned to Don Davis, preferably before May 29. See also the letter to parents (for 2008).
