Written by Nishad Patkar – 12A

On Monday 10, November, four Sixth Formers represented the school in the prestigious Senior Team Maths Challenge in the regional rounds. At a school in North London, two Year Twelves (Nish Patkar, Kristy Ho) and two Year Thirteens (Alex Bucur, Adam Wiechecki) competed against 19 other schools in three different rounds. The first round was the group round, where the team had 40 minutes to solve 10 problems of increasing difficulty. Through creative problem-solving and teamwork, they walked away with full marks, which put them in the top five at that time. A similar story for round two, where the sixth formers split up into pairs to solve a cross number, a crossword but with numbers instead of words, where each pair worked on either the down or across clues. After full marks in both rounds, the four had high hopes of getting first and making it into the national finals and this belief stayed strong as they kept on not making a  mistake in the shuttle round, a round where the answer to one question was needed to solve another so pairs had to take turns solving questions. That was until the very last question where a small slip-up by the team lost them a few marks and hence they got 175/180. Nonetheless, our sixth formers placed second in the competition, beating the very best minds of London. Overall, the day went extremely well with our students learning skills in team work, problem solving and perseverance and they should be proud of representing the school to such a high degree.