Deerfield Math Competition

On Saturday, April 26th, the Deerfield Math Club hosted its eighth annual Deerfield Math Competition (DMC). The DMC, modeled after the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament, invited students from surrounding middle schools to compete in a series of student-written math problems across four sections: Individual Theme, Individual Relay, Team General, and Team Guts.

Throughout the day, participants worked in the Garonzik and solved a wide range of complex problems, testing their collaboration and critical thinking skills. Eaglebrook came victorious with two of their teams placing first and third, while Bement placed second. Junior Vice President of the Math Club Kyle Yang ‘25 said, “The Eaglebrook faculty really liked it, and the students had a lot of fun.” 

A key feature of this year’s DMC was its increased pool of participants. Yang explained, “This year, we got a really big turnout… around 70 to 80 students… [and] a lot of schools, many schools we don’t normally see.” He credited the success to the logistical team’s efforts in outreach and coordination, which brought schools together through targeted emails and efficient surveys.  

Points during the competition were tracked via a Google Sheets with automatic score calculation. Andy Chen ‘25, who helped organize the problems and keep track of scoring during the competition, explained, “The power of setting up a Google Sheets is that you can accommodate for any number of competitors and any number of scores.” He believed that this system vastly improved the efficiency of the scoring process compared to the earlier years of DMC.

However, Yang mentioned that due to the large number of participants, the team experienced a “small hiccup in the spreadsheets during the competition.” Chen explained that the function for calculating the scores was not transferred to the final spreadsheet, resulting in slight delays in the proceeding. Nevertheless, the team quickly fixed this issue, and Chen described, “[In the end], the Google Sheets were working out, the score calculations were correct…and the new system of scoring ended up having no ties.”

In addition, Yang also credited the problem-writing team for their efficiency. The problems had to be challenging yet not discouraging, and intellectually demanding but still fun. The team, consisting of students from all grades, went through iterative stages of brainstorming, drafting, and revising. Each problem was carefully reviewed and refined to ensure clarity and appropriate difficulty. After the competition, the team met to analyse results from each problem to assess the quality and effectiveness of each question.

Reflecting on his two years of participation, Yang expressed, “I think this was the best year we’ve had…it’s been getting more organized, [and] it’s been getting more students.” Chen shared similar sentiments, stating, “I feel like at this point we definitely streamlined the process…[and even though] we had 80 students with different answers and only four people, it only took us 15 minutes.”

As the DMC grows, the Math Club looks towards future improvements. Yang described that they will continue the dynamic scoring during certain rounds, which results in a more energetic and competitive atmosphere. Chen also encouraged students to “sign up to be a chaperone and to help solve some problems…[because] it doesn’t require a lot of skill.” He recounted his experience of organizing the DMC, saying, “It’s something that’s really inspiring to me and something that’s really fun.”