Tribal Tribune March 2014 | Page 3

2,4,6,8 ... Mathletes go to State Six HPMS Mathletes Move On After SMU Competition   Slade Sinak, Michael Xie, Michael Zhan, and Parker Lake competed in the Mathcounts competition at SMU. The team made third place winning a trip to the Mathcounts State Competition in Austin and an iPod Shuffle. The competition was a head-to head, one-to one challenge to press the buzzer before the opponent did and answer a math question correctly. Often, the competitors would complete the questions before the person who is reading the question finishes reading.   Sinak and Karen Chen made it into the top 16 in the competition and advanced during the countdown round.   Since Chen had to leave early and was unable to By: Christian Schaeffler compete, Richard Luo took her place. Chen and Calder Sinak were two of three who were not able to complete the competition; they each brought home a TI-nSpire calculator. Xie alone made it to second place, winning a video camera.   Our ten mathletes were chosen to compete at SMU because their math scores were in the top ten from our school. Over the next weeks the MIS/ HPMS math team will be doing several TMSCA competitions, UIL and preparing for the Mathcounts state meet. Our MATHCOUNTS competitors are shown here taking a break between events on the SMU campus Music UIL HPMS Music students compete in UIL By: Christell Foote   On March 6-7, HPMS band, orchestra, and choir went to compete in the Music UIL competition. Here are the results:   The seventh grade girls choir received superior ratings in stage performance and sight reading. The eighth grade girls got superior ratings in all. The head director of the HPMS girls choir, Mr. Farr, said how very proud he was of their hard work: “It took a total of seven to eight weeks to prepare, and in the end I thought they did well with the three songs we prepared.”   The HPMS orchestra went to the South Grand Prairie High School to perform and came out with superior ratings and earned a sweepstakes trophy. This was the 18th year that the orchestra has received that trophy.   Eighth grader Christina Bambach, a member of the HPMS honor band said, “It was a great experience to prepare me for high school competitions. We had to practice a lot, but in the end I thought we did well in the competition.” The HPMS honor band did extremely well and received super