WALNUT, CA--Medallions were awarded to proud 7th and 8th grade student teams representing the Walnut Unified School District at the 2011 Los Angeles County Office of Education Mathematics Field Day.

Eight students from Suzanne Middle School competed among 300 elementary and middle school students representing 22 school districts at Wilson Middle School in Glendale on June 4. 

The WVUSD 7th grade team was Kyle Trieu, Christopher Wang, Winnie Wang, and Jessica Wei with teacher Amy Erickson as the adult representative.   The team won three medallions - Bronze in the Conceptual Understanding and Skill categories and Silver in the Problem Solving category. 

The WVUSD 8th grade team was Ming Hung Hsieh, Donghyeo Kim, Hyun-Soo Kim, and Ted Zhu with parent representative Lana Trieu. The team won two medallions - Bronze in Problem Solving and Silver in the Conceptual Understanding category.

Mathematics Field Day serves as a crowning activity to a year long instructional program in mathematics.  Its purpose is to develop mathematic concepts and problem solving techniques, to encourage interest and relevancy of mathematics, and to promote the importance of mathematics as stated in the California Mathematics Content Standards.

This is the 26th annual event for grades 4, 5, and 6 and the 17th annual event for grades 7 and 8.

In the Team Events, Round 1(Conceptual Understanding) and Round 2 (Problem Solving), four-member student teams solved mathematics problems aligned to their grade level and standards.  The students were allowed only a very short time to solve problems quickly and accurately.  And the complexity of some problems was so difficult that some teams had no guesses or answers.  The Round 3 category Procedural/Computational Skills is an Individual Event, although the scoring was by team.