On Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023, 128 middle school students filed into the Science Lecture Hall to partake in a biannual tradition. Excitement and chatter filled the air as high-schoolers in green T-shirts ran around, setting up equipment and printing hundreds of papers. Finally, a hush fell over the hall as the Opening Ceremony of the Lexington Math Tournament (LMT) began.

Every year, Lexington High School’s math team organizes the LMT, a competition for the middle schoolers of New England and the greater United States, challenging both math veterans and novices alike to solve inventive problems that promote critical thinking.

Members of the math team dedicate a few weeks every year to prepare for the competition through tasks like writing problems and solutions via an online forum, test-solving and proofreading the questions to ensure accuracy, and setting up the facilities. The problem-writing process requires particularly intensive work.

“[Math Team members] are responsible for writing the problems and writing the solutions to their problems. After they write the problems, I select which problems to put on the test,” Derek Zhao, a junior and math team captain, said. “If a problem is too hard, it’ll either not get considered for the tests, but if I think it’s a cool idea, I might try to think of a way to make it easier.”

On the day of the competition, everyone is assigned a certain role, whether that is proctoring the students, delivering printed papers, or organizing mini-events such as Tetris, Nerdle, Science Bowl, Geometry Bee, and Estimathon. Since many of these volunteers participated in LMT as middle schoolers, they feel greatly inclined to help run the competition while at the high school.

Still, running a day-long tournament always comes with unforeseen complications that can delay events.

“We ran into some logistical challenges with printing, sorting, and handing out more than 100 tests,” Ella Kim, another junior math team captain, said. “But we were able to develop an efficient system for dealing with them by the second round.”

At the end of the day, math team members gained a better understanding of both academic topics and educational outreach through the process of running the competition.

“Writing problems helps you understand concepts better than solving them some of the time. Also, running a competition just helps people learn how to run things in general,” Zhao said.

The winning team of this competition was Jonas Clarke Middle School’s “Evan Chen Fan Club” (named after Assistant Director of the Mathematics Olympiad Program Evan Chen). The middle schoolers felt that this event was a fun experience that helped them improve their math skills and prepared them for high-level competitions down the road.