On April 12, 114 students, from second grade to sixth grade, gathered at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center for the second Noetic Math Learning Contest of the school year.

The Noetic contest is a biannual math problem solving contest available for second- through sixth-grade students. The goal of the competition is to encourage young students’ interest in math to develop their problem solving skills and to inspire them to excel in math.

Noetic is a national competition in which students’ scores will be compared with other students nationwide. Last fall, 18,000 students took part in the competition.

Many local elementary and middle schools were represented at the contest including Redmond, Norman Rockwell, Albert Einstein, Christa McAuliffe, Louisa May Alcott, Rosa Park and John Audubon elementary schools as well as Redmond Middle School and International Community School.

Elly Sarwono has been involved in getting kids excited about math since 2007. Last year, she formed Ellipsis Academy to continue her passion in bringing fun in mathematics through after-school programs. In addition to providing after-school math programs at Rockwell, Audubon and the community center she also organizes, sponsors and volunteers at other math competition events such as Math Kangaroo and Math is Cool. Recently, Sarwono added a workshop for motivated sixth graders who plan to take Algebra 1 course in seventh grade.

At the Noetic contest, students were given 20 questions and 45 minutes to solve them. About half of the students were first time contestants. They were all competing for medals, which went to the top scorer for each grade.

Final results will not be known until sometime in May but all participants left with a certificate of participation.