Fifteen problems. Two hours. No multiple choice.
The Mathworks Math Contest asks middle-schoolers to do what a classroom rarely asks: not merely to get the answer, but to show how they got there, in writing, to someone who will read it. In 2025 it drew 962 students from the United States and abroad. The average score was 2.72 out of 15. Fourteen of those 962 scored twelve or better.
This book teaches that.
375 problems written for the training camp at ACES Learning Center in Austin, Texas, in four parts and twenty-four topic chapters — rates and work, angle chasing, lattice paths, invariants, cryptarithms, modular arithmetic and the rest. Every one is worked through from scratch.
Every problem gets three things
- A solution that explains itself — not just the steps, but why you would think of them, and what you would have tried first.
- A sample written solution, set in handwriting: the short, labeled write-up that actually belongs on an answer sheet, with the answer boxed. Not a paragraph of prose, and not a page of scribble with a number circled at the bottom. This is the part almost no student is taught.
- A second look, wherever one exists — the shorter route, the cleverer route, or the one that explains why the first route worked.
The companion sets are the heart of it
Forty-seven times in this book, a problem is followed by two or three more that use the same method, and then a short box headed Taking stock. A method you have seen once is a trick. A method you have seen three times, in three configurations, with one case where it nearly fails, is a tool you own. The last problem in each set bends the method until you can see its edge — the configuration where the obvious version gives a clean, confident, wrong answer.
Built as a course, not an answer key
Each chapter opens with the skills that unlock it, stated as tools with their actual formulas rather than as topic headings, and closes by naming its hardest problems and the one idea that cracks each.
Where the problems come from
The companion problems were written from scratch for this book. The core problems are adaptations: each began as a problem from the published record of middle-school competition mathematics, including past MMC and PMWC papers, and was rewritten here with a new setting, new names, a redrawn figure and, nearly always, different numbers. Nothing is reproduced word for word, and no contest answer key was used. Every solution was worked out from scratch by the ACES coaching staff — coaches of national-champion MATHCOUNTS teams — and checked line by line.
A companion Workbook contains all 375 problems with room to work and nothing else.
For students in grades 6–8, for coaches who want a year of ready material, and for parents looking for something harder than the textbook and kinder than a wall of answers.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Texas State University Mathworks or Po Leung Kuk.
