The next ARML contest will be held Saturday June 2, 2012. We travel to Penn State on Friday June 1. This conflicts with an SAT date. You can arrange a conflict makeup date with SAT, but it is not a simple matter. It is better if you take the SAT in May. Information about the alternative testing appears here. ARML is a legitimate conflicting activity, but if you decide you must take the June SAT, start early working with your school official to arrange the makeup test. Here is an official statement from the College Board stating that ARML is a legitimate reason for an alternate testing date. You may need to show this to your school official.
The Lehigh Valley team will have five teams of 15 people, the Fire, the Ice, the Lightning, the Thunder, and the Storm. 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. Practices are held at Lehigh University Sundays from 3:30 until 6:00. We had two fall practices, October 2 and November 13, and will probably have nine in the spring. We have no activities during the winter except for the trip in February to the Harvard/MIT (HMMT) contest. Our roster for the 2012 HMMT contest is full. The next activity is the Lehigh Contest March 3, which all prospective team members are expected to take, if at all possible. Contact Don Davis for information about the contest, or if you are interested in being on the team but feel you cannot participate in teh March 3 contest. In recent years, the team has included many students from 75 or more miles away from Lehigh in all directions, including New Jersey. Students whose schools participate in the Central Jersey Math League and who have not been on the Lehigh Valley ARML team in the past are not eligible to be on the LV ARML team.
Although ARML consists of difficult questions in high school mathematics, we have found that talented middle school students can perform very successfully at ARML. The 2010 national champion Lehigh Valley Fire team included an eighth grader and a seventh grader among its 15 members. One way for prospective students to decide whether they might fit into the team is to look at some of the old Lehigh math contests. Out of the 40 questions on the 2011 contest, most people on the Storm team answered 9-13 correctly, the Thunder team answered 14-18 correctly, on Lightning 19-22, on Ice 23-26, and on Fire 27-39. There are exceptions to this, and many other factors are taken into account for team placement, but these scores correlate highly with team placement.
If on June 1 we have more than 75 people who want to go, then those not selected to one of the five teams can go as alternates, although with five teams now, we will try to avoid having more than 75 people. Alternates go with the rest of the team, wear the LV T-shirt, but participate 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. Practices are held in Maginnes Hall, room 101. Maginnes Hall is located on the Lehigh University campus. You can park in the Campus Square parking garage entered from Morton Street just below (north of) campus. You need not put money in the meters on Sundays, and you may park in spots labeled Faculty and/or Staff Parking (on Sundays). Maginnes is just above (south of) this garage. Asa Drive is a small street that runs between them. You can drive onto Asa Drive for dropping off, and can enter the garage from that side. If the garage is full, you should be able to find nearby street parking, and on Sundays you may park in virtually any spot. Here is a map of campus in which Maginnes is building 9.
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.
Advice about preparing for ARML, written by Ken Monks. See also his "playbook", which contains many useful formulas and facts.
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 2011 all costs were covered by our sponsors. We expect this will again be true in 2012. 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 most recently Bullpen Capital, and has made a substantial contribution to the LU Contest and LV ARML team for the past six years. Other sponsors are Google and Lehigh University Department of Mathematics, Integrated Business and Engineering program, and President's Office. Any corporation interested in sponsoring a portion of the expenses of the Lehigh Valley ARML team should contact Don Davis.
We will travel to Penn State on Friday June 1, 2012, 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.
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 have instituted 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 for fast food on the way home.
After dinner, ARML students go back to the dorm and usually play cards or frisbee. There is also a math lecture at 8:00, which many of our team members have enjoyed in the past. Another activity is the ARML Song Contest, which takes place at 9:30 PM Friday. Teams will have prepared songs about ARML or Math, usually to the tune of some pop song. The Lehigh Valley entry won the Song Contest in 2010 and 2011. You can view both.
It is imperative that students obey the 11:00 curfew. In the early years of LV ARML, we had some disciplinary problems in this regard, but in recent years students have obeyed team rules. 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 6:10 to 7:20. 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 6:50. The contest begins at 8:00 in a building about a 1/2 mile walk from the dorm. We gather outside the dorm about 7:30 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 Center for the Individual Questions. There are five 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 Center 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 championships in 2005, 2009, and 2010.
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 performance mentioned above. And there are the Tie Breaker questions for the individual championship. Students who got all 10 right (or if no one accomplished that, then those who got 9 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 for fast food 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? 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 must be returned to Don Davis by May 15. See also the letter to parents.