The Maths Club compete in the UK Senior Maths Challenge 2011

A report from Rachel Atkinson

On Monday a group of four mathematically inclined St. Clare's pupils took part in a national competition in mathematics, Rachel Atkinson; Hussain Ahamed; William Kochanski; Mohammadali Badri.

The competition took place at Wheatley Park School lasted a total of three hours beginning with a warm-up and continuing with three rounds: a cross-number, a group round, and a relay. The first event was the cross-number, an activity similar to a crossword. This part of the competition had the team split into two smaller groups of two; each group was given clues, one for the numbers going across and the other for those going down. The group round came next. In this part of the competition, the whole group worked together to solve ten problems in a timeframe of 40 minutes, a seemingly ample period of time that was somewhat confining in actuality. The relay was, at the very least, an interesting exercise. It split the team into two groups of two to answer problems, apart from the first question, each successive question required the answer from the previous question to solve. Though we did not perform as well as we had hoped, we improved last year's ranking and are confident that next year's group will do even better.

December