Content analysis of mathematics competitions in the last three years of primary school

Competitions are an important part of our history and culture, their meaning however also reflects in mathematics. With the help of competitions between the mathematicians, we came to many new insights. Competitions are also important in elementary school, because we use them to motivate students and get them excited about informal mathematics research and learning. Because of the important influence that mathematic competitions in elementary school have on the popularization of mathematics, in the last years more competitions with mathematical content appeared in Slovenia and abroad. Because mathematical competitions are increasing we compared the existing competitions in the research from several aspects: the aspect of content, the aspect of mathematical representations, the aspect of type tasks, the taxonomic levels aspect, and the task background aspect. Based on the content of the analysis, we can conclude that the competitions among themselves differ in the above criteria. We discovered that they are diverse enough to cover all the content areas. We see a room for a new competition if it was only limited to arithmetic and algebra. We also found out that in the school level competitions we don't find tasks that require justification from the students and it would make sense to review competitions on higher level. The tasks that test procedural knowledge are rarely appeared, which was expected. For further research we recommend analysis of the quality of the tasks in each competition and comparison of the past tasks separately