King's School, Bruton, Maths Competition

On a warm Monday afternoon 14 of our top Year 8 mathematicians ventured across to King’s Bruton to compete in the Joint Hazlegrove and King’s Maths Competition. Joining Year 9 pupils from King’s, they formed six mixed ability groups.

The competition was divided into three rounds, the first was called the Group Round which consisted of 10 stretching maths word problems which they had to divide up among the group and tried to make sense of. The next round involved a tricky cross number challenge, with half of the group battling through the across clues and the other half the down clues. This round always starts slowly but very quickly picks up speed as one clue leads to the next. The final round was the Relay Challenge where again the groups of four were split into pairs and took turns pitting their wits against a series of progressively more taxing maths puzzles, and like a relay one pair got a chance to rest while their teammates sweated and then they handed the baton on and swopped around.

All-in-all, a long afternoon of maths for them but I was enormously impressed by how they rose to this challenge so sensibly and how they applied themselves right the way to the final whistle.

In the end Group Six (Oscar W, Kitty M and Naomi H) won – with an impressive 107 points.