Y7 & Y8 Olympus Team Maths Challenge

What a day we had at Abbeywood! 48 mathematicians from KS3 classes at Abbeywood, Bradley Stoke, Patchway and Winterbourne, expertly supported by 12 mathematicians from KS4 and KS5 at Abbeywood, took part in a day of mathematical challenges.

Round 1 was a taxing head to head guess the rule round, where students had to guess the output that a complex function would give without knowing what that function was. Abbeywood and Winterbourne were the clear winners in that format. Round 2 was a Crossnumber round where one pair had the clues to the across digits, and the other pair had the clues for the down digits. Bradley Stoke’s teams had clearly practised this type of challenge and came out ahead with some enormous scores.

After a short break we had the group round, where students could work individually or as groups to answer ten interesting problems. Teams from Winterbourne and Bradley Stoke topped this round, and those two were tied for the lead as we headed into the last round. 

And so we came to the final round - the relay. This was an incredibly frenetic and fun round where each pair had to finish a question, scramble to their supervisor at the other end of the room to grab the next question to then pass to the next pair to tackle (and take a brief breather). There were some notable scores from Patchway and Winterbourne, but sailing away, and remarkably completing all 30 questions in the allotted time were Bradley Stoke team 1, who ended the day with a fantastic table-topping score.

The final results were:

3rd: Winterbourne 3

2nd: Winterbourne 1

Winners: Bradley Stoke team 1: Harry T, Zackary P, Jakub M and Henry B.

Enormous thanks go to Simon Hardy (head of maths at ACS) for organising and running the day so smoothly, Abbeywood Community School for hosting so warmly, the supervising KS4&5 mathematicians, the teachers (Mr Hardy, Mr England, Miss Rahim, Mr Newport) for training and organising their school teams, and mostly to the students for coming along, taking part joyfully, and excelling mathematically.

Next summer we look forward to the year 9 and 10 team challenge, which will be taking place at Winterbourne Academy on the 29th of June.

Dominic Bareau