Nate Rummel loves math.
The 12-year-old middle schooler forfeits a session of recess each week to participate in his school’s math club and spent last week pleading with one of his teachers for a chance to join his classmates Friday in Bethesda for a mathematics competition just to test his mettle for the second straight year.
“I just like doing it, I guess,” he said. “I’m good at it.”
It is that enthusiasm for mathematics that Carderock officials say they’re trying to foster in students through competitions and outreach programs to create a generation of naval architects and Marine engineers to make up for an expected wave of retirements in the Department of Defense.
Rummel of Virginia joined 196 students from Montgomery County, Fairfax County and Washington, D.C., Friday at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division in Bethesda for the Navy’s third annual MATHCOUNTS competition — a math-based contest for middle school-age students. Carderock is the researching and testing facility for Navy ships and submarines and hopes to use its stock of engineers and facilities to inspire young students to take advanced-level mathematics and sciences course, said Toby Ratcliffe, the coordinator Carderock’s educational outreach program.
“The Navy is a highly technical service ... we have an interest in encouraging these students to learn more,” she said.
Almost half of the DOD’s scientists and engineers are expected to reach retirement within five years, Ratcliffe said. She could not identify how many scientists and engineers work for the Department of Defense.
At least 13,000 military civilian lab scientists are expected to retire before 2018, according to the National Defense Education Program’s website. NDEP is the U.S. military’s educational outreach program.
Navy officials hope to fill the void those retirements create by getting students excited about becoming engineers, scientists or joining technical fields.
“We have to have a workforce that is as strong as possible in mathematical skills,” said C.F. Snyder, Carderock’s technical director, who is charged with overseeing civilian-run engineering programs there.
In addition to hosting the math competition and offering facility tours, Carderock offers teacher training for robotics competitions and SeaPerch, a contest where students build model-scale underwater remotely controlled vehicles, Ratcliffe said.
Math in Montgomery
Interest in the county school system’s Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program, an accelerated instructional program, has risen — particularly in at Montgomery Blair High School, where applications for enrollment jumped from about 500 last year to 540 this year. Blair can enroll about 100 students into its ninth-grade class each year. Poolesville High School also operates a similar program for up-county students.
The school system partners with federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg to offer activities and internships, as well as free professional development for teachers, said Anita O’Neil, the school system’s Supervisor for Science, Technology and Engineering.
Although she said she gets positive feedback about these efforts, she is hesitant to say whether they are effective ways of raising test scores or encourage students to take advanced science and math courses.
“I wish we could design a metric for measuring what exactly is effective...but there’s a lot of factors involved,” she said.
Montgomery County Public Schools released statistics in December showing 31,734 of its students took Advanced Placement exams in 2011 — 71.8 percent of which scored 3 or higher on a scale of zero to five. AP exams are administered by the College Board. That was a more than 1,500-student increase from 2010.
The amount of Montgomery County schools students scoring above average on one of the two AP Calculus exams stood higher than their peers in Maryland and across the nation, with 27.8 percent of students who took them hitting a score of 5, compared to 23.7 percent in the state and 20.1 percent in the nation.
The increased interest is easy to explain, according to Associate Superintendent of the Office of Shared Accountability Adrian Talley. The school system has spent six years encouraging high school students to take at least one AP course.
“We’ve raised the expectation level at all our schools,” he said.
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