Regional Maths Challenge Final

Four students from Years 12 & 13 represented BRGS at a Regional Final of the UKMT (United Kingdom Mathematics Trust) Senior Team Challenge competition at Lancaster University on Friday 4th December.

The students – Isabel Cormack and Aimie Foster (Year 12), Arslan Ahmed and Connor Richardson (Year 13) - were chosen to take part by their Further Maths teachers.

They were up against 20 other schools from the Lancashire and Cumbria regions and competed in an afternoon of challenging problems and puzzles that required them to use many different aspects of their mathematical ability.

Although BRGS didn’t finish in the winning places, the students found the event an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Arslan said: “This was one of the most difficult things I’ve done in Maths, but I really enjoyed it.

“A lot of the questions were really challenging and we had to go back a few years to recall some basic mathematical techniques needed for higher level questions, but between us we got there most of the time.

“I thought we worked well as a team and it was also a good experience to see university life for a few hours.”

Maths teacher Mr Wilbraham, who accompanied the team to the Regional Final, commented: “This is the first time I’ve taken a team to the Senior Challenge and I’m really pleased with how our students performed.

“Some of the other schools have been competing in the Challenge for many years and have built up plenty of expertise, while we are still relative novices.

“Despite this, the team performed extremely well, particular in the Cross Number round, which is like a crossword, but with numbers!

“The difficulty with this round is that some across clues can’t be answered without knowing solutions to down clues, which in turn might need input from other across clues. It’s very challenging and requires good team-work, which Isabel, Aimie, Arslan and Connor displayed.

“We scored 49/60 on this round, which is an excellent score.”

The BRGS team are pictured at the end of the afternoon and here are two of the warm-up questions the students were given when they arrived at the event, ‘to get their brains working’.

Question 1

The area of a pond covered by algae increases by 50% each week. After how many weeks will the covered area be at least 17 times as large as it was to start with?

Question 2

Three years ago my nieces’ ages were in the ratio 3:4:5; they are now in the ratio 4:5:6. How old will they be six years from now?

Contact Mr Wilbraham (msw@brgs.org.uk) if you want to know the answers.