On 12th March 2024, two teams of Year 10 mathematicians from Bishop Luffa competed against their opposite numbers from Chichester High School, Ormiston Six Villages Academy, and St. Philip Howard Catholic School in a series of problems ranging from quizzing, through logic puzzles and crossnumber (the mathematical sibling of crossword), to construction of 3D models of cubes and even rhombic decahedra (3D shapes with 10 faces, each of which is a rhombus!) The competition spanned five rounds in total, and featured problems and exercises designed to show off lots of different areas of GCSE mathematics, as well as to provide some real-world context for where this maths might be useful in the future education and career paths of the students.
Beginning with a terrifically exciting TV quizzing round, students raced to find the missing number in a series of increasingly cryptic sequences, in the style of the game show Only Connect. This was followed by a tricky crossnumber puzzle. Similar in nature to a crossword, in that clues are required to fit together into a grid, but all of the clues were maths problems with numerical answers! Teams were divided into two parts for this task, and each half were tasked with filling one set of clues, either across or down, before coming back as a whole team to fit their answers together. Next, students were plunged into the world of logic – the mathematics of rules, decision making, and deduction – and tasked with analysing and inventing their own “worlds” in which people are only permitted to exist depending on the colour combinations among the hats that they wear! This was a two-step task: in the first round, students were given some rules and asked to deduce which combinations could be true and which must be false, and in the second half they had to create some of their own combinations from scratch. Finally, we moved into the mathematics of shape, for a task in which students were asked to create models of cubes and rhombic decahedra from cardboard and tape, and then calculate things such as the surface area and volume of their creations. Throughout the event there were numerous appearances of Pythagoras’ theorem, trigonometry, number skills, algebra, and bunches more of the core skills that are so prevalent throughout GCSE mathematics.
Of course, when all is said and done, competitions have winners. I am beyond proud to announce that Bishop Luffa School and our students walked away with the following prizes:
- WINNERS of the TV quizzing challenge
- WINNERS of the crossnumber challenge
- HIGHLY COMMENDED in ALL rounds of the event
Huge congratulations are due to Jennifer Fitzgerald (10Story), Kathy Nightingale (10Burrows), Hayley Martin (10Wilson), Harry Kemp (10Sherborne), Austin Uphill (10King), Ned Coles (10Sherborne and Tom Vosper (10King) for their tremendous work ethic and application of mathematical knowledge across the whole event.
Mr Damien Clarke, Teacher of Mathematics