By the TMC (Alex and Aarav, Year 9, and Ben and Alexander, Year 8)

At 8:30 am, our Maths Team met up on the playground, elated to compete in the Wilsons Regional for the TMC competition, hosted by UKMT. At around 8:45 am, we hopped onto the 154 bus to travel to Wilsons. Upon arrival at Wilsons at around 9:30 am, we were greeted by one of the students from Wilson's school and led into a massive hall with neatly organised tables. On each of the tables, there was a folder with all the questions, which the teachers kept and some warm- up questions, which our team immediately cracked on as we took our seats on our table.

At 10:30 am, the first round of the competition started: the group round, where all four members of our team answered ten questions. Our team excelled in round one, earning full marks on it along with some other schools such as Wilson's school. Special thanks to Aarav Mukherjee for brute force on one of the questions where all the sums of the squares had to be written down. Well, to be honest there were much more efficient methods with that question but since we had time, we decided to answer the question correctly with absolute certainty.
At around noon, there was the second round: the crossnumber. This meant that the team was split into two, the year 9 duo (Alex and Aarav) and the year 8 duo (Alexander and Ben), with one pair doing the across clues and one doing the down clues. The crossnumber is like a crossword but with numbers instead. With this round once again, we scored full marks in it, which gave us the lead so far in this competition.

At 1 pm, it was lunchtime. Our team took a slight break eating our lunch before breathing fresh air. Aarav brought a massive orange highlighter and started smelling it (yes it smelt nice with a citrus scent). To our dismay, a teacher from another school told Aarav to stop sniffing highlighters because of the negative health effects. After the incident, we went back to our table, fully refreshed for the final two rounds of this competition.

After lunch, it was the shuttle, where we were split into the same pairs once again. However, unlike the crossnumber, there were four questions, with the answer for the first question needed for the second question, the one for the second question needed for the third and the answer for the third question needed for the fourth one as all four questions were linked. We scored full marks in the shuttle round, meaning that our placement in the competition depended on our fourth and final round: the Relay.

Finally, it was the Relay round, where a pair (for our instance our Year 8 duo: Ben and Alexander) had to run to their allocated teacher to get the question, answer it, run back to the teacher to mark it and then hand a different question to the other pair, which was Alex and Aarav in Year 9. Fortunately for us, we answered the first few questions with ease, speed and accuracy until a graph question was met by the Year 9 duo. We made our first attempt and got it wrong. That was fine: we had two attempts but then, after three long minutes of thinking, we made an educated guess on the question but got it wrong. Two points were lost. Two crucial points. We ended up finishing the competition with only one mistake: only two points lost because of the graph question. Seems like a small mistake right? Wrong. When the awards were announced, we were devastated to become second in the regional: Wilson’s took first place, beating us by only one point in the entire competition. One singular point led to Wilson’s victory.

On the bus back to school, we felt disappointed, reflecting on the mistakes our team made and the improvements we would make. We hoped to get into Nationals because only first place in a regional competition had a guarantee to earn a spot in nationals. Luckily we earned a spot too.

After hearing about our qualification to the National final and with 2 weeks of research on the same document and calls ranging from 6am to 10pm it was the day. With our team tired form our early morning call at 6am despite the fact that we hopped on a call at 10pm we arrived at the school rushing our last minute poster and on how to design it, as we heard the bells and the complete silence of the school with maybe 2 or 3 only there until we heard more sound with more teachers arriving.

We realised we didn’t have much time. It was stressful and panicking but it was time. We had to take a packed train from Sutton to Victoria due to the Northern Line having major delays. After a 30 minute train with lots of people bunched up together.

Finally, we arrived at a massive hall (you know what else is massive…) with a bunch of schools across the country from Northern Ireland all the way to China and we started at 10:30 am provided with fans and pens and we started our poster round with 3 questions which we rushed but the main issue was finishing the design in time. It was tough and had to use every second rushing with speed as we frantically wrote the answers to the questions down.

Next it was the group round, it was quite easy and we excelled in it but it was a lot more interactive with extra sheets and materials to test out our findings. Now it was lunch, we had sandwiches, chips and snacks but as an “act of kindness” Aarav’s cookies were stolen by Alexander and he donated them to Nonsuch very gracefully. But then, the real trauma began, next it was the shuttle, with some questions being extremely easy but some were absolute hell with us only getting 45/60.

Afterwards, it was the crossnumber, a generally relaxing round but only 30 minutes but we completed it in time with accuracy as we had a few minutes to spare as we looked at the problems, some took a lot of trial and error and some were easily identifiable. Now the final round, the relay with lots of kids running around the hall and as officials said we had 35 minutes, but really we had 30 minutes and some problems we had blazed through but others took several minutes to solve. Time was ticking down to 0 and with 5 seconds left Aarav and Ben had a problem to solve and Ben solved within 3 seconds but it was too late, by one second and sadly we couldn’t get 2 extra points despite our greatest efforts.

Then the posters came out and luckily we were longlisted due to the great heaps of information on our poster and it felt great. WWeeks of research finally came to something important. Then, it was the awards ceremony.

Sadly, we already knew we wouldn’t be top 3 due to the trauma we perceived from the Shuttle and Relay rounds but nevertheless, it was an extremely fun experience with maths, food and free goodies.

We then took the Tube to Morden where our team separated as some of us took our routes home and some with the school. All of us in the team enjoyed it as Alexander and Ben had another year in this competition but Aarav and Alex were going to KS4 meaning we could no longer do the TMC. After a few days, Ms. Kendall posted the result on the homework machine and it was announced we got 23rd.The TMC was an extremely enjoyable experience with lots of new memories and our team got to know people we barely talked to in other years.