Melinda Abernathy
Thursday, March 3, 2011 4:32 pm

Monday, February 28 and Tuesday, March 01, 2011 were far from normal for Mrs. Abernathy’s 4th grade math students at Hickman County Elementary School. 

The 4th grade spent most of the school day in the computer lab participating in World Math Day.  The actual World Math Day challenge commences the moment it is March 1 on the International Date Line and concludes 48 hours later when it is no longer March 1 anywhere in the world. 

Our 4th graders competed against other students their age from around the world. In real time, students had 60 seconds to answer as many mental addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division questions as possible. 

The levels of difficulty of the questions vary according to age. Students are automatically matched against other students of a similar ability by a ranking system from Raging Rookie to Human Calculator. 

At one point during the day there were 68,710 users online participating in this world wide event. This year, there were 5,288,713 students from 32,513 schools in 238 nations taking part in World Math Day 2011. 

This is a truly international event with students participating from all across the world answering 428,598,214 problems in 48 hours. At one point during the competition, Mrs. Gallimore’s homeroom ranked 36th among all 8-10 year olds participating in the event. 

Our top student answering 8,003 problems was Jordyn Naranjo!!

Congratulations to our Hickman County Elementary 4th graders for answering 123,684 problems correctly during this world wide event. We are VERY proud of everyone’s hard work!! 

For more information, you can visit www.worldmathday.com.