Quite literally hot on the heels of the recent Senior Maths Challenge is the Senior Team Maths Challenge – a similar competition but one which involves students working together to solve problems! And this year our team – which consisted of four students; second year A Level students Daniyar Tatishev from Kazakhstan and Sunghee Park from South Korea, as well as first year A Level students Jiaxin Gong (also known as Mimi) and Xinxin Zhuang (also known as Cindy), both from China – finished in a highly respected 9th place in our regional heat!
This achievement is even more impressive when you realise that our team only had a few days to prepare for the competition!
The competition, which is made up of three different rounds, took place on Wednesday 24th November at Ravens Wood School which is several miles away from Bellerbys College London and so our principal Andy Quin genorously arranged for a taxi to pick our team up from Bellerbys College and take our students to the competition in style! Our team was accompanied by Maths teacher Clive Cubitt who, along with fellow teacher Faissal Taheri, had worked very hard to prepare Daniyar, Sunghee, Mimi and Cindy before the big day. None of the students had taken part in this competition before so it was a very new experience for them but one they all enjoyed and I’m very proud of how well they have all done!
Although next year Daniyar and Sunghee will have moved on to university, Mimi and Cindy will still be with us and so hopefully they will be able to take part again in 2011 and with their experience maybe we’ll do even better next year!
Maths challenge
Maths challenge
Image by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/acidwashphotography / CC BY 2.0
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Dr John McDarby is a Maths teacher at Bellerbys College London, a university preparation college for international students.
