Maths challenge is put on each year to encourage students to work on their problem solving skills which is in fact one of the most important skills for a mathematician.
Students spent their maths lessons prior to the challenge working together on some challenging questions and coming up with some very inventive solutions.
The challenge itself is a 90 minute exam which includes 25 questions ranging from reasonably easy to very difficult. Students are awarded 4 marks for a correct answer but are deducted 1 mark for a wrong answer, which immediately introduces tactics.
Students went into the challenge with an open mind and an eye on the prize…namely a bronze, silver or gold certificate, depending on how well they did. After the exam, students said they found the event very enjoyable and are looking forward to finding out their results in a couple of weeks time.
Just to give the readers a flavour, here is one of the problems…
The diagram below shows 6 regions. Each of the regions is to be painted a single colour, so that no two regions sharing an edge have the same colour. What is the smallest number of colours required?”
Maths Problem