GAIM

Anya Ostrovsky

“Yes!” I exclaimed. This is the email that I had been waiting for! It was an email about the Girls Adventures in Math (GAIM) competition, which I participate in every year. It’s a team math competition for girls to expand their knowledge of powerful women in math, and to solve fun math problems. The email had lots of useful information and other details about the competition. 

After scrolling through it for a couple of minutes, I saw the registration link. That evening, I went to my dad and told him about the email. 

“Dad, look,” I said, “GAIM is open for registration!”

“That’s awesome, let's sign up,” he answered.

 We registered, and I knew that I needed to start preparing. Leading up to the competition, I did practice problems every day to strengthen my mind and get ready for it. I would go home after school, look at problems from previous years of the competition, and attempt to solve them. I also take math lessons once a week, so I dedicated time in each lesson to work on the GAIM problems. 

After many weeks of preparing, it was finally time for the competition. I got the rosters for the teams the day before the competition started, and I was excited to have classmates I work well with on my team. There were sixteen problems, one and a half hours, and four of us. 

Traditionally, we are given pieces of paper with the problems on it so that we can work on them independently, and then give and get feedback with our group members. Because the year I was doing this particular competition was during Covid lockdown, my team and I had to participate in it at a zoom meeting. Because we were on Zoom, we were unable to solve all the problems on one sheet of paper, so we had to think outside the box. 

We were given a file of all the problems and a Google form where we could submit the answers. By talking to each other, my team and I decided that when one of us had completed a problem, we would put the answer and problem number in the chat. When we put it in the chat, someone else would check it, and then the person responsible for filling out the form would submit the answer. We split the problems up so that we would each do four, and we had different people checking everyone else’s answers. 

After making this plan, it was time to start the competition.

“Okay guys, let's have fun and solve all these problems!” a groupmate said.

“Okay,” the rest of us answered.

When starting the competition, the problems were not incredibly challenging, and so we were all solving them pretty quickly. We would check each other's answers, and for the first part, all of them were right. After a while, we ran into a problem. There was one math problem that we had all checked, and we all got different answers.

“What do we do now?” asked the person who started out with the problem.

“Let's try to solve it together,” I said.

“Sounds good.”

We started working on the problem together and proposing different ways of solving it. After a while, we found a solution that seemed reasonable. To be sure, we all double checked on our own, and when we got the same answers, we wrote down the right answer to the problem.  

After we solved this problem, we continued working and continuing to figure out the solutions to more problems. Whenever someone ran into a problem they couldn’t solve, we all helped each other and solved it together. Right before the end of the competition, we compiled our answers and put them in the google form.

“Good job guys,” I said.

“Yeah this was really fun,” answered a groupmate.

We said goodbye to each other, and Isha, who was mentoring the meeting, ended the session.

After impatiently waiting for many weeks, and coming to Isha’s office to try and get the results, we finally got an announcement in advisory. 

“Today, the GAIM results will be announced to the whole school,” said Ben.

“Hooray!” I said.

Everyone was gathered on the middle school playground and waiting for Isha to share the results. She started reading out the ratings and placings. Multiple teams placed in the 50% category, and then only a couple in the top 30%, and then she got to the highest rating: the top 10% in the country. She looked through her papers and said,

“And the highest rating, for the top 10% nationally goes to team Blue Narwhals-7M!”

Everyone started cheering. My team and I stood up happily and walked up to Isha to get our medals. I had a big smile on my face that no one could see because I was wearing my mask, but I felt so accomplished in that moment. 

This was what I had been working towards for over three months, and I felt that all my hard work had finally paid off. I knew that if I put my mind to it and worked hard at it, I could become confident in my math skills, and be able to win this competition. I used intrinsic motivation in the countless hours I spent preparing and even during the competition. Overall, this was one of my biggest accomplishments, and I am glad that I participated in the competition.