Senior Team Mathematics Challenge

M. Dawson, V. Smith, P. Barber and G. Addison travelled to Horsham to take part in the 2010 Senior Team Mathematics Challenge.  This is a national competition with about 1000 entries from all across the UK.  At Horsham our team was competing against teams from Christ’s Hospital, Ardingly College and Worth – as well as some local state schools. The event features three rounds – the first is a group round, with the team answering ten questions in forty minutes.  The second round is a cross number – similar to a crossword but the questions and answers are all mathematical.  To make this even harder the team are split into two pairs – one pair can only see the across clues and one pair can only see the down clues. Finally a relay round where the team are again working in pairs. The first pair complete question 1 and their answer is passed to the second pair who use the answer for question 1 as part of question 2 and so on.  After four questions the team’s efforts are marked.  Despite a very good score in the cross-number (78 out of 80) the other rounds proved too much for our team and their final position was very low indeed.The winning team achieved a perfect score in every round - giving us much to aim for in future years.  Thanks to Ms Pritchard for looking after the team and to Mr Hall who ran the whole competition and who writes some of the questions for the UKMT.Mr P. Hall