ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – For the first time in its history, a girl has won the Orange County Math Bee.
Addison Dixon is a fourth-grader at Killarney Elementary School and “out-mathed” 24 other finalists, winning the $1,000 grand prize.
Dixon said she is saving $900 for college. She said the other $100 will be spent on “slime and squishy things.”
“It’s like really exciting because you get so much money and everything,” Dixon said.
The 24 finalists were all fourth grade students from Title 1 schools.
John Pedicone, a computer engineer with Synopsys, helps organize the math competition. He says fourth grade is the building block for math and science.
"If you can't do multiplication and division, you can't do algebra, you can't do trigonometry and you certainly can't do calculus,” he said.
“You can predict how a student's learning potential is by how they're doing in math and reading in the fourth grade.”
Portia Horne, from Eccleston Elementary, won the $500 second place prize. Giovanni Miranda, a Rock Lake Elementary student, won $250 for finishing third.
The math bee recently expanded to include one school in Osceola County.