WEST WINDSOR — Spending a Sunday afternoon solving math problems may not be most students’ idea of a good time, but Chaitanya Asawa said the mathematics competition he organized wasn’t supposed to be too much like homework.
“These mini events have puzzles such as Sudoku or Rubik’s Cubes or other things, such as buzzer-based math competitions,” Asawa, 16, said. “Different games — I guess you could call them games — involving mathematics.”
Asawa, a senior and president of West Windsor-Plainsboro South High School’s mathematics club, hosted the competition yesterday to get more elementary and middle school students interested in math.
The competition was open to students in third through fifth grades. Asawa estimated that 400 students from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut participated in the event.
“If they like the games, hopefully that will make them interested in math,” Asawa said.
Asawa himself became interested in the subject during his elementary school years. He entered local competitions and joined his school’s math club. He also teaches younger students at a local library.
And now that he’s taken all of the math courses offered in his school’s curriculum, he’s taking an analysis class at Prince-ton University.
It was during a math class that the idea for the tournament came to him, he said.
“We were thinking about what got us into mathematics and what we could do, because the math club at the high school focused on ourselves,” Asawa said. “We thought it would get kids interested in mathematics just like we once got interested.”
The money raised from the tournament’s $10 to $15 entry fee will be used to enhance mathematics education in the community. One idea the math club had was to purchase new math books for teachers. The books Asawa hopes to get are comic books that still fulfill the core state standards of teaching, he said.
“We thought if we could buy enough we could give one to all the teachers,” he said. The students didn’t think they’d raise enough money to provide books for all of the students, so they’re hoping the teachers can use their copies for teaching material or share them with the students.
The 50-student club thought of the idea for the tournament in May, and started seriously planning it in August. The club hopes to do a number of projects to give back to the math education community, Asawa said.
The top-performing students in the higher grades all won graphing calculators and some students took home a math computational program capable of solving the most complex equations.
“I think research mathematicians probably use similar programs for their work,” Asawa said.
Asawa hasn’t yet decided where he’d like to attend college and has only just started the application process.
And, as much as he loves mathematics, he isn’t sure he wants to have an entirely math-based college curriculum, he said.
“I feel that the new thing is interdisciplinary studies, so something that combined different areas of science and math would be cool,” he said.