Medals Galore for our SEAMC Mathematicians 2018

At the beginning of March, twelve BIS students travelled from Ho Chi Minh City to Manila, Philippines to compete in the 2018 South East Asian Mathematics Competition (SEAMC). This competition embodies the spirit of communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and cultural competence through the attendance of a diverse range of schools from various countries.

Billy Lim, Woo Kyung Shim, YoonYoung Choi, Seo Hyun Kim, Min Ho Kim, and Yoon Su Jang formed two teams of Year 10, with Joseph Kang, Dong Hyeon Lee, and Alden Ng forming the Year 9 team. Than Tran, Nathaniel Vo, Carl Chua also joined the team as a SEAMC plus team (Seniors). YoonYoung Choi brings us all the highlights from the event…

We left excited and nervous for the two days of competition ahead! We were welcomed to the event with an evening of dinner and icebreaker challenges. 

Our first activity was the open round. We formed teams with students from other schools and were tasked with a mathematical poster. We were required to answer 4 (incredibly difficult!) open-ended questions in our very limited spare time, and produce a poster summarising their answers. Because of the nature of the competition, we didn’t go to bed until very late in the evening!

On Friday, all 300 students began the competition at Brent International School Manila. Before beginning the competition, a guest speaker, James Tanton gave us a very interesting presentation in which he tried to prove that 1=2 (which happened not to be true at all). During the competition we took part in a number of rounds: individual, codebreakers, shuttle and an inspiration round. During the inspiration round, everyone visited the Enchanted Kingdom theme park in Manila and were given a task to produce a short video explaining about mathematical principles found in the amusement park. At dinner, Seo Hyun was chosen as one of the 13 top students in the previous codebreaker round to compete in the final.

On the last day of the competition, students took part in the remaining 4 rounds: duel, innovation, lightning and pursuit. All the students were extremely engaged in these challenging rounds and tried their very best.

Congratulations to all the BIS HCMC students who participated! As a team, we left with 5 medals - several from individual rounds and buddy team rounds. Also, 2 of our students received black medals which are given to the top 7 students of the whole competition.
9 students also received the ‘Golden Ticket’, which is a qualification for the World Mathematics Finals held in Melbourne, Australia in June 2018.

Overall, students got to spend a fantastic weekend collaborating with some very energetic and enthusiastic Math students.

YoonYoung Choi, Year 10

#STEAM