PURPLE COMET! MATH MEET INFORMATION
The Purple Comet! Math Meet is an international mathematics competition for middle and high school students. The contest is entirely administered over the Internet from the contest web site at http://purplecomet.org. Teams of from one to six students compete by submitting solutions to a list of mathematics problems. There is a seven-day window (April 12 through April 18) during which teams may compete choosing a start time most convenient for them. The problems range in difficulty from fairly easy to extremely challenging. In 2009 over 7,000 students competed on over 1700 teams from 25 countries.
There are two levels of competition:
- the middle school contest consists of 20 problems to be completed in 60 minutes;
- the high school contest consists of 30 problems to be completed in 90 minutes.
There are four categories of teams:
- teams whose members all attend the same large school;
- teams whose members all attend the same small school;
- teams whose members attend more than one school or are home schooled;
- teams with no restrictions that do not compete for awards.
HERE IS HOW IT WORKS
- Each team is required to have an adult supervisor.
- The adult supervisor must register at the contest web site.
- An adult supervisor may register as many student teams as they want.
- Registration for the 2010 contest begins Monday, February 01, 2010 at 00:00 (midnight) UTC.
- Registered teams may begin the contest any time during the contest window April 12 through April 18.
- During the contest, when one or more team is ready to begin the competition, the adult supervisor will log onto the contest web site and start the contest clock for each team ready to compete.
- During the competition students on a team work together to solve as many contest problems as they can.
- After their contest clocks have been started, middle school teams have 60 minutes to solve as many of the 20 problems as they can; high school teams have 90 minutes to solve as many of the 30 problems as they can.
- Once a team’s contest clock is started, the team will be able to view the list of contest problems and begin submitting solutions to the problems.
- Printable versions of the contest problems are made available to the adult supervisors before the contest begins so they may prepare printed copies of the problems for the students to use during the contest.
- Student teams may keep submitting solutions to the contest problems until their allotted time has run out.
- After the end of the seven-day contest window, solutions to the contest problems and the names of winning teams will be posted on the contest web site.
Complete Rules
