Year 8 Mathematicians Take On Queen's Taunton Maths Challenge

On Thursday last week four intrepid Year 8 mathematicians travelled across to Queen’s College Taunton to compete in the Queen’s Math Challenge.

Using resources adapted from the UKMT Team Challenge, Queen’s compiled a superb competition divided into three stages. The first round was called the Group Round which consisted of ten taxing maths word problems, which were based on the core Year 8 maths syllabus, but also challenged them to think outside the box and find innovative solutions. Our four mathematical ambassadors had to divide these ten puzzles between themselves and race against the clock in an effort to find as many solutions as they could in just 45 minutes. The second round was a clever adaption of the standard cross number-type maths puzzle. This time the team was split into pairs with one pair attempting the down clues and one pair the across clues. Communication was limited between the pairs, but they still needed to rely on each other for clues to help them unlock some of the really tough questions in this section. Finally, our team raced against all the other schools present in the thrilling maths Relay Round, which saw them battling to solve a series of progressively more difficult maths puzzles in pairs.

All-in-all an extremely challenging day of maths, but I was delighted to see how seriously our team competed and their incredible focus and effort through each exciting round.

Mr Shaw

Click here to see all the photographs on Flickr