
For seven of the last eight years, a Lincoln Middle School team has won the Florida MATHCOUNTS championship. Two Lincoln students this year also earned spots on the state team.
The MATHCOUNTS middle school competition, sponsored by the Florida Engineering Foundation, was held in Orlando over the weekend.
The winning team was made up of eighth graders George Paret, Daniel Wei, and Ben Chronley and seventh grader Edwin Gao. Jason Zhang, a sixth-grade student, was the team alternate.
Jennifer Frazer, a counselor at Buchholz High School, coached the Lincoln team.
The team earned the highest number of points based on team member performance in individual and team events. Zhang also won the state competition for alternates.
The team also won the ciphering competition, where students had 45 seconds to respond to a problem shown on a screen.
Paret, Wei, Chronley and Gao made it to the MATHCOUNTS countdown round, where the top ten students compete. This was the second time that all four of Lincoln’s team members got into the countdown round.
Paret took second place, Wei won fourth, Gao took seventh place and Chronley finished ninth overall.
Paret and Wei, having finished in the top four at the state competition, earned themselves spots on the Florida MATHCOUTS team, which will travel to the national competition in Washington, D.C., in May.
Teams from Howard Bishop and Kanapaha middle schools also competed at the state contest.
Four other students placed among the top 50 finishers at the state competition, including Andrew Xu (18th) and Jessie Deng (50th) from Lincoln, Harshitha Guruprasad (32nd) from Howard Bishop and Mario Duron (39th) from Kanapaha.