VENTURA : Youths Square Off Over Square Roots

Question: What is the smallest integer greater than the square root of 300?

For many children, tackling math questions like this one might seem a less than ideal way to spend a Saturday morning.

But for the 52 participants in Mathcounts competition at Anacapa Middle School in Ventura, the challenge suited them just fine. (The answer, by the way, is 18--and the question was among the easiest of the contest.)

“It’s pretty exciting,” said 14-year-old Chris Scottan, an eighth-grade student at Ojai Valley School. “The questions take a lot of logical thinking and less mechanical work.”

Working in teams of four, students from 11 Ventura and Santa Barbara county schools vied for the top three spots, which send them to the statewide competition on March 4.

Goleta Valley Junior High in Goleta placed first for the second year in a row. Two Ventura County schools, Los Primeros School in Camarillo and Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park, placed second and third, respectively.

Mathcounts is a coaching program and series of competitions that aim to increase math achievement and literacy in junior high school students. It is sponsored locally by the Ventura and Santa Barbara chapters of the California Society of Professional Engineers.

“What we’re trying to do (with these competitions) is to get parents and everyone to understand that children need to learn more than rote memorization,” said Ruby Durias, a math teacher at Fremont Intermediate School in Oxnard.

After the competition, the contestants--divided about evenly between girls and boys--were given certificates honoring their participation, with trophies and plaques going to top finishers.

Albert Chen, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Los Primeros, placed first in the individual competition and is part of the team headed for the statewide championship.

“I was surprised to win,” said Albert, who has moved beyond algebra and now is in an independent study program for math. Asked what he and his teammates were doing to celebrate their victory, he smiled and said, “We’re going out for pizza.”