Year 9 and 10 Olympus Team Maths Challenge – 30/6/25
What a day we had at Patchway! 48 mathematicians from KS4 classes at Abbeywood Community School, Bradley Stoke Community School, Patchway Community School and Winterbourne Academy, expertly supported by 10 mathematicians from KS5 at Bradley Stoke and Abbeywood, took part in a day of mathematical challenges.
Year 9 and 10 Olympus Team Maths Challenge 30/6/25
Round 1 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 three teams had clearly been practising this type of challenge and took three of the top four places after this round, with Winterbourne C a notable second place. Then came the new surprise round – a head-to-head guess the rule challenge where teams alternated for the chance to win points by guessing the missing number. Patchway A, Bradley Stoke C and Winterbourne C were the highest scorers in this relatively stressful and very challenging task. After a short break we had the group task, where tactics mainly centred around tackling the different questions individually and then asking others to check. Abbeywood team A was incredibly methodical about this – checking and re-checking each other’s work using colour codes and fast thinking. Two teams came out of this round with full marks – Abbeywood B and Bradley Stoke B.
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). Winterbourne B got a fantastic 30 points, but Bradley Stoke C won yet another round with an incredible 49 points to win the overall trophy.
The results were:
1st: Bradley Stoke team C (Ethan Chan, Riley Bruce, Hughson Tan and Vachan Thange)
2nd: Bradley Stoke team B (Sara Ali, Gracey Yip, Dimitris Tsigkogiannis, Sue Lee)
3rd: Abbeywood team B (Mearusha Thamilselvan, Daniella Sissons, Joshua Chan, George Hugo)
Enormous thanks go to Patchway Community School for hosting, the supervising KS5 mathematicians, the teachers (Mr England & Mr Jones, Miss Rahim, Mr Newport, Mr Hardy) for training and organising their school teams, the other mathematicians who came along to help (Mr Davies, Miss Todd, Miss Wright, Mr Reynolds), and mostly to the students for coming along, taking part joyfully, and excelling mathematically.
Next year we look forward to a year 7/8 challenge on Monday 1st December being held at Abbeywood, and a year 9/10 challenge taking place on Monday 29th June 2026 at Winterbourne.
Will we see the trophy move away from Bradley Stoke after a threepeat?
