Students take part in UKMT Junior Maths Challenge follow-on rounds and win the UKMT Team Challenge

News - Jul 9

Following on from impressive results in the UKMT Junior Maths Challenge back in April, our strongest students have continued in the challenge and taken part in one of the two follow-on rounds.  

Eighteen students in Year Seven and 20 students in Year Eight took part in the Kangaroo round, well done to all and congratulations to those who achieved a merit: Siddharth A, Samuel G, Finlay H, Ryan W and Yuan L in Year Seven, and Javier C, Felix D, Zachary D, Zion G, Cara H, Daniel J, Lawrence S and James K in Year Eight.  

The two students who took part in the Mathematical Olympiad will receive their scores in a couple of weeks.  

Back in March 2020, we were about to take a team of two Year Eight and two Year Nine students to the UKMT Team Challenge regional round, but, unfortunately, Covid meant that the competition was cancelled. Recently, the competition finally returned, and Mr Fudger took a team to Exmouth Community College to test themselves against 13 other teams in our nearest regional final.  

After some warmup questions, the team took part in four rounds, each lasting around 45 minutes and in a variety of different formats culminating in the organised madness of the relay round where each pair is seated in a different part of the room and after answering a question must then deliver the next question to the other pair. It was noticeable that we faced particularly strong competition this year, with quite a few other selective and independent schools taking part. Our students demonstrated excellent teamwork, discussing the maths involved and checking each other’s work and we are pleased to say that they finished in first place.  

Congratulations to Samuel B and James K (both Year Eight) and Toby S and Emily K (both Year Nine), this was a fantastic achievement against tough opposition. Mr Fudger thinks that this year’s win is even more impressive as the calibre of the opposition was much higher than the previous times that he has taken teams to these events.