Junior Team Maths Challenge 2025
At the end of March, Keynes, Wojtek, Titus and Dexter participated in the annual Team Maths Challenge hosted at Wilson’s School.
After a few warm-up questions, we felt confident in performing well. In Round 1 (Group), we worked together to deal with ten tricky questions, and we successfully solved all of them.
Then it was the Crossnumber round - a crossword but with numbers. We lost one mark, so had a score of 113/114. Some schools had not lost a mark yet, so we had to keep up our performance to qualify for the National Finals.
In Round 3 (Shuttle), we got all the marks, including the time bonuses, and in Round 4 (Relay), we answered all the questions in the time limit, giving us a score of 235/236.
We then sat down excitedly waiting for Mr Lissimore to announce the top three highest placed schools.
Thankfully, that was enough for us to get first place, winning by one mark, allowing us to qualify for the National Finals!
Report written by Dexter (Year 9)
Participating in the TMC was enlightening. I got to do what I found interesting and got to know other people from my school, whom I knew very little about.
Our team consisted of me, Keynes, Dexter and Titus. When we all met in the Recital Room, I was intimidated by the number of people participating. However, I became less nervous as the challenge began. The first round included 10 questions for all of our group to answer. We immediately split all of the questions between ourselves, with Dexter and Titus getting three questions each and me and Keynes getting two each since we were the younger of the four. We swept through the questions with no mistakes.
Next up, was the crossword puzzle with numbers instead of letters. The caveat was that we had to split up into pairs, with one pair getting the across clues whilst the other pair got the down clues. What made this especially difficult was that the two pairs couldn’t communicate, and some clues relied on other answers, which meant that if a certain clue wasn’t solved, it would impede our progress. Titus and I worked on the down clues whilst Keynes and Dexter worked on the across clues. We only lost one mark, which disheartened us since every mark counts in this type of competition. However, we didn’t dwell on it for that long since we had two other challenges left.
The third challenge was a series of questions in which the previous answer allowed us to solve the next problem. Once again, the same rules applied to this round as the last round. We had once again avoided losing another mark which helped us gain confidence. The last round was, in my opinion, the most interesting of the rounds. We were once again split up into pairs; however, to get our question, the other pair had to show the teacher the answer to their problem and hand over a sheet of paper to us with our problem, which we had to solve and show to the teacher, which allowed us to give the other pair their problem.
After repeating that a few times and solving all of the problems, we had nothing to do except wait for the results. When the time ran out, the teachers counted up the scores.
We were delighted to hear that we had won and would be going on to the next round. In addition, we also got a tangram as a prize
Overall, participating in the TMC was a very nice experience, which I hope to do again next year!
Report written by Wojtek (Year 8)