Northbrook Geometry Class Places Third In International Contest

NORTHBROOK, IL — What started out as a friendly competition to try to earn some pizza money for their classmates added up to a Northbrook Junior High geometry class coming together to finish third in an international math problem-solving competition.

Mary Claire Seeberg’s class wound up completing 75,048 math problems during the month of April to place third in the IXL Learning Showdown, the district recently announced. The virtual competition, which was sponsored by IXL — an online supplemental math resource program — was being used by Seeberg to prepare her students for the upcoming Illinois Assessment of Readiness, according to a news release.

The Spring Learning Showdown initially offered the chance to win prize money, which was to be used for a classroom pizza, the release said. Despite being in junior high, Seeberg’s students competed against high school students because the geometry class is technically a high school-level class. The Northbrook class competed against more than 26,000 classes from around the world and could track their progress using a leaderboard.

After two weeks, Seeberg’s class could sense they had the opportunity to place in the international competition and began accessing the problem-solving contest from home at night and over the weekends, the news release said.

Eighth grader Matthew Yuan led the local charge by solving 8,070 problems over the month, followed closely by classmate Ellie Farber, who completed 8,013 problems. Matthew said that he often stayed up late to put in the work, according to the release.

“If it’s for pizza, I’ll do it,” he said.

Ellie had her own motivation, according to her teacher.

“It’s fun, it's a challenge and you get to learn new things,” Ellie said in the release. "The competition was fun.”

For Seeberg, the competition had its own merits besides the bragging rights that came to her class after placing third. With both her in-person and remote students able to access the learning challenge, charging up the leaderboard regardless of where her students were learning created a sense of camaraderie.

“I hope the students always remember how they came together as a hybrid class,” Seeberg said in the news release. “We had active engagement from both our students in the Remote Learning Academy and students attending school in-person. It also helps that they learned and practiced some math along the way!”