ORLANDO, Fla. (April 4, 2003) – For the first time, middle school students from around the state who participated in the MATHCOUNTS State Tournament used a new answering device created with help from the U.S. space program. The “Ciphering Round” of the tournament, in which 242 students from 62 different schools participated, featured the new high-tech answering system and took place March 21 at T.D. Waterhouse Center.
     The MATHCOUNTS program, which is mentored by the Florida Engineering Society and sponsored nationally by NASA, for years used a hard-wired system to record students’ response times during competitions. The system was difficult and time consuming to install, failure prone due to age, and with bundles of wires running to a central computer, a safety hazard.
     Glenn E. Forrest, P.E., vice-chairman of the state MATHCOUNTS committee, began looking into a new wireless system in 2002. “We thought there might be systems like those used on games shows that could be adapted to our needs, but these were very expensive and out of our reach financially,” Forrest said.
     Forrest discovered the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program (SATOP), which provides free engineering assistance to small businesses with technical challenges through the donations of time and expertise from 32 Space Alliance Partners.
     SATOP enlisted Mike Bauman’s help. Bauman is a senior network engineer with Dynacs Inc., a SATOP Alliance Partner located at the Kennedy Space Center. He discovered that there was no commercially available system that did what the MATHCOUNTS competition required. “There were audience voting systems, but they could not distinguish differences in response time. They just tallied responses,” Bauman said.
     As he researched the problem, Bauman found security systems that he thought could be adapted for Mathcount’s use. He also located a company that would be willing to create a customized solution for MATHCOUNTS – Dakota Security Systems in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Dakota Security Systems delivered the new MATHCOUNTS system in November.
     Forrest said that the new wireless system brings MATHCOUNTS into the 21st century, which should help the program attract more participants. “The mission of MATHCOUNTS is to increase enthusiasm for mathematics in the middle school grades,” he said. “Of course, students are very concerned about being cool, so giving them a high-tech answering system inspired by the space program definitely increases our ‘cool’ factor.”
     Four students from the Florida MATHCOUNTS competition will advance to the national MATHCOUNTS Tournament held in Chicago on May 8-11.