Recently, St Stephen’s School has had groups of maths students from years 7 to 12 competing in a quiz style maths competition at various schools across the local area.

They took part in teams of up to 6 answering 8 maths problems of varying difficulty over 4 rounds within a time frame of 20 minutes per round.

There were around 20-25 schools competing and the students represented themselves and the school fantastically well and seemed to really enjoy the evening.

The students were lucky enough to explore various exciting problems as well as developing their team working skills.

For those of you who would like an example of the questions then here you go:

Year 7 & 8

1. A car-wrecker counted 167 tyres on the cars in his yard. He found that not one car had a spare tyre and that 5 cars had at least one tyre missing. What is the greatest number of cars that he could possibly have in his yard?

Year 9 & 10

1. The head of a fish is 12cm long. The tail is as long as the head and half the length of the main body. The main body is as long as the head and tail together. How long is the fish?

Year 11 & 12

1. Barry has a drawer containing 12 black, 12 brown, 12 blue and 12 green socks which are not properly paired. He takes socks out of the drawer at random in the dark without replacing any. How many socks must he take out to be certain he has a matched pair in each of the four colours?

I, Adam Merrifield, would like to thank the students and staff involved for giving up their time for helping these evening sessions run smoothly.

Bring on next year!

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” – Albert Einstein