Sisters students triumph in math games

A powerhouse team of nine students from Sisters Middle School won this year’s Central Oregon Pentagames, a math competition held at Crook County Middle School on Friday, April 28.

This was one of seven sites around the state in which simultaneous, identical games were conducted. Based on an accumulation of points, winners are declared for each site but not for the state as a whole.

Sisters Middle School math teacher Tricia Biesmann, who took her team to Prineville and helped judged the competition, said this was the first time Sisters had won in recent years. “In the last couple of years we’ve been second overall,” she said.

The name Pentagames stems from the Greek word for five (as in Pentagon) and reflects the fact that the games contain five main activities or forms of competition. Some are performed in teams and some are done individually. Some are timed but others are not.

Three groups of three students each represented Sisters. They were, from the seventh grade math class, Haley Hancock, Zech Michel and Ali Wimer; from the eighth grade math class, Joe Grant, Justin Bechard and Bastian Brandt; and from the eighth grade algebra class, Dallas Frederick, Jake Lasken and Hayden Hudson.

Briefly, these are the games in which they participated:

In Math Tac Toe they played Tic Tac Toe with numbers.

In Solve That Problem teams of three were given a story problem and asked to “bid” on how long it would take them to solve the problem. If they reached a solution within that time or less they received a proportionate number of points. If it took them longer than their bid time, they were penalized.

In CR Squared (short for “compare, revise, revise”) teams were given a set of facts and asked to make educated guesses about the final answer. In the next round they were given a few more facts, and so on until the progressive clues led them to the answer.

In 35-Minus, individual students did computation problems in 35 seconds or less.

The final event was a team relay involving each school’s whole team. A student raced from one end of the gym to the other, picked up a problem appropriate to his or her grade level, wrote the answer and, if it was correct, raced back to tag his or her next teammate.

“Our kids blew those guys away” in the relay, Biesmann said. The accumulation of individual and team points from all five competitions gave Sisters its victory overall.

“We had such a great time,” said Biesmann, who is in her 24th year of teaching at Sisters Middle School. “It’s a great activity and it celebrates academics and we don’t have enough of that.”