Our Prep and Upper mathematicians joined forces on Monday 18 March to compete in the regional finals of the Team Maths Challenge. Their superb performance earned them fourth place (out of 32) – the best performance for the school in recent years.
Keshav Navalkisor and Will Reddy from Y8, together with Fourth Formers Sunny Ye and Shawn Shen, travelled to the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics to take part in the challenging competition.
During the day the boys’ maths skills were tested as they completed four rounds of competition. In the Group Round, the boys worked as a team to answer 10 questions of varying type and difficulty against the clock. In round two, the ‘Crossnumber’ – which is similar to a crossword but with numerical answers, the boys worked in pairs, one pair solving the across clues and one pair the down clues. Round three, the ‘Shuttle’, again called for pair work against the clock to correctly answer a series of four questions. However, the answer to each subsequent question was dependent on the previous answer, so they could not afford a wrong answer! Finally, in pairs once again, the boys took it turns to solve problems in the ‘Relay’ round. This round involved lots of movement as well as mathematics.
Our congratulations go to all four boys, who put in a tremendous amount of effort into the competition and clearly reaped the rewards.