Tournaments Highlights

YOUR LOCAL ORGANIZATION CAN CONDUCT ITS OWN TOURNAMENT WITH CONSIDERABLE HELP FROM MOEMS.

The main features of the Tournament are:

This is your group’s tournament.
The benefits to your group are many.
Your group invites several schools to send teams to compete face-to-face at one site.
Structure
The 4-hour, 30-minute schedule includes time after each event to discuss solutions, an important feature.
Finances
MOEMS provides electronic tournament-ready masters for five major components
Support

1. This is your group’s tournament.

Everything is packaged under the name and logo of your group, which you place in large print at the top of every sheet of paper. Contests, flyers, and awards all display your name prominently. “MOEMS” only appears in small print in the copyright statements.

2. The benefits to your group are many.

The tournament has the potential to: enhance your group’s reputation for promoting excellence in mathematics; introduce an organization to teachers and administrators unfamiliar with it; recruit new members; and recruit new workers.

3. Your group invites several schools to send teams to compete face-to-face at one site.

Picture 100-200 students together just to do mathematics. This creates excitement and underscores the importance of mathematics.

4. Structure

Students from different grades can be mixed on each of the 5-member teams because the problems require mathematical thinking, not knowledge of any specific curriculum. There are 3 rounds and an awards ceremony.

- Individual round: each student works alone on 10 timed short-answer problems.
- Team round: all five team members work cooperatively on another 10 timed short-answer problems.
- Playoff round: up to 5 additional problems with time constraints break ties for awards.
  
  All problems (with detailed solutions and an answer key) are supplied by MOEMS and are non-routine short answer questions.

5. The 4-hour, 30-minute schedule includes time after each event to discuss solutions, an important feature.

MOEMS supplies transparency masters, detailed solutions, and, where possible, multiple methods. There is also time for a mid-morning snack and lunch, and an awards ceremony.

6. Finances

An organization sets, collects, and keeps all per-team fees. Your total expenses, including the MOEMS fee, is likely to be less than $500. At a suggested per-team fee of $50, the break-even point is just 10 teams. Our two pilot tournaments each hosted 25-30 teams after turning away teams in order to control numbers.

7. MOEMS provides electronic tournament-ready masters for five major components

camera-ready copy for all problems, solutions, scoring keys, etc.;
transparency masters for the discussion sessions;
7 edit-ready letters in Word for all communications;
a formatted scorekeeping spreadsheet in Excel;
and a highly detailed instruction and reference manual.
The MOEMS flat fee of $250 for the first tournament ($175 for each additional tournament in the same region) is a fraction of your organization’s income that is generated by the registration fee.

8. Support

The Tournament Handbook, a very thorough reference manual, walks your tournament committee through every aspect of mounting a tournament, including that of recruiting new workers. It addresses a wide range of procedures and subtle decisions that need to be made.

Topics include:

how to recruit workers and teams;
how to handle every aspect of preparation;
how to efficiently conduct each facet of the tournament day itself;
and how to follow up afterwards.

As few as 3 people can organize and prepare it all. As always, MOEMS will respond quickly to every email or phone call in order to help.

For further information contact MOEMS at info@moems.org, call us at 1.516.781.2400, or fax us at 516.785.6640. Please supply the name of your organization, district, or college, and all appropriate contact information.