Monmouth County High Schoolers Win Big Prize

A group of Monmouth County high schoolers competed against teams from across the country in a recent applied math contest.

So how'd they do?

The High Technology High School math team landed in second place in the Moody's Mega Math Challenge, winning a big prize of $15,000!

The HTHS math team with their teacher, Dr. Raymond Eng, and Fran Laserson, president of The Moody's Foundation (SIAM [Society for Industrialized and Applied Mathematics)[/caption]This was no basic math test, either. The competition took place on Monday in New York City, with each team presenting an answer to a very practical question: Can school lunches be nutritious, affordable, and delicious?

Students figured in things like the correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity levels, how sleep deprivation relates to the amount of calories a high-school student needs to consume at lunch, and how a person's chemical makeup influences the food choices they make.

It's part science, part sociology, part math, and lots of intelligence.

Congratulations to Cynthia Guo, Ruby Guo, Patrick LeBlanc, Austin Liu, Zachary Liu, and their teacher Dr. Ray Eng on a job very well done!

High Tech High has a lot to celebrate this week, as they were also named as one of the top 20 schools in the country!