It started well with the Kahoot on Monday break time; the Atrium was packed with students aiming to be crowned the winner of the quiz. Monday’s Sudoku challenge was immensely popular with both the younger and older students. Tuesday’s Pi Recital competition was highly impressive, with Enya from Year 11 winning, having memorised Pi to a staggering 134 decimal places! The Maths Casino on Tuesday lunchtime proved very popular with Key Stage 3 and 4 students, with Robin (Year 11) accumulating the most ‘wealth’! The various Relay races injected some physical exertions into what is often regarded as a fairly static subject, whilst the various Treasure Hunts and Maths Trails kept students engaged during their free time.
Wednesday saw our guest presenter, Zoe Griffiths, come to school and deliver sessions on probability, the maths in The Simpsons, and the maths of technology. Students were rightly impressed with the delivery of the sessions, as well as the content. We all learnt a lot from these presentations, especially how much maths is actually in The Simpsons, and the mathematical background so many of their writers come from. The Workshop Zoe offered to some select Year 10 and Year 11 students taught the participants various magic tricks which rely on mathematics to explain them. Do ask for a demonstration from your child if they were lucky enough to be involved.
The Integral Maths Ritangle Competition has now begun properly, so groups of students will be busily working away at the 21 problems that will be released daily over the next three weeks. Let’s hope one of our teams can come out on top! Tuesday saw a group of students sitting the UKMT Senior Mathematics Challenge. The results for this will be published in about three weeks, so I look forward to reporting home on these.
And finally, the next set of Monthly Maths Problems have now been uploaded to Firefly, in addition to the solutions to the previous set. So although Maths Week is over, there are still plenty of opportunities for students to engage in recreational mathematics outside of lessons!
Jon Dancyger
Head of Mathematics
