Crack Math Challenges

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 thingsA 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.Built as a course, not an answer keyEach 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.Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Texas State University Mathworks or Po Leung Kuk.