Woodlawn Elementary takes on math competitors

After solving one problem, a Woodlawn Elementary student faces another and then another in matter of seconds.

Multiply hundreds or even thousands of math problems solved per student by Woodlawn's 545 students results in a multitude of students excited about math.

The students are participating in school and at home in the VmathLive competition on the Internet. The "V" stands for Voyager, a company that sells curriculum software to schools.

Advanced academics fifth-grader Sylvia Roberts has VmathLive as her homepage on her home computer.

"It's really fun; I do it at home a lot," she said Tuesday before starting another 60-second timed session in the school's computer lab in the media center.

The online competition pits the students against one to four other students from around the world in a race to answer the highest number of simple math problems.

Though students are only doing addition, subtraction or multiplication problems in the 60-second bursts, the competition acts as a lure for them to practice their higher-math skills.

"We're kind of dangling the carrot out there, but then when we teach something in class, to reinforce it I give them assignments," said fifth-grade teacher Tim Bowers. "Before they can go on this Vmath they have to complete their assignments."

With Vmath the students motivate themselves, he said.

Selecting the teacher page, Bowers notes a couple of students with scores in red, which means they answered correctly on less than 85 percent of the problems they faced.

With a few quick moves on the math program, Bowers reassigns the math tasks to the students who had low scores.

The students have been working on the following math skills: probability, substitution, graphs, decimals to fractions, percents, decimals and geometry.

In the third week the school has been using the Vmath program, Bowers' class has been moving up in rank in the weekly contests.

On Tuesday afternoon the class was third in the U.S. and 20th in the world with 45,397 correct answers.

Meanwhile, Kathy Shoemaker's second-grade class was ranked 12th in the U.S. with 28,999 correct answers.

Fifth-grader Adrian Brown announces that he's competing against a student from New Zealand.

"Yeah!" he exclaims after 53 correct answers in one minute.

But, in the next session he faced a tough competitor.

"Some guy from Puerto Rico smoked me," Brown said. "I'm not really good at addition or subtraction, but multiplication I can really fly through. I don't really know why."

Fred Wild Elementary School has also used Vmath to engage students in learning.

Woodlawn Elementary Principal Kaye Bowers summed it up this way, "you'll see them smiling; they like math; they can't wait to do math and that's pretty big."