SPS Mathematics Blog

With the Senior Maths Challenge (SMC) a week away, 8 th form students are preparing at the Senior Problem-Solving Club. The Senior Problem-Solving club is a lunch time activity where students work through a mix of interesting and stretching questions.  The focus this week was on the hard final question on the paper with Dr Hemery and Mr Morris providing the last 20 years of question 25.  Here is an example: As the final and typically the most demanding question of the SMC, it provided an excellent test for even some of SPS’s best problem solvers.

Tuesday (17th September) saw the official launching of the 2024-25 Hans Woyda season with our third annual friendly with SPGS. The SPGS team arrived to join the 12 SPS pupils who had made it through the selection process, and after a quick bout of randomised team drafts the pupils settled into their chairs for the first match of the year. The teams were named Alpha, Delta, Gamma and Zeta. The starter questions proved challenging for all of the teams, with only Alpha and Delta managing to get more than half of them right. Geometry was a very different story with success very nearly across the board, although this round turned out to be Gamma's Achilles heel and put them at a disadvantage for the rest of the competition. For the next section the hall was split into two sides, with teams taking it in turns to hand in their answers first and their opposite numbers only getting a shot at the marks if those answers were wrong. Fortunately there was some strong mental arithmetic on disp...

The Hans Woyda Maths competition is a London based interschool challenge. A big difference to other competitions is that it is a vertical year group team containing a Fourth, Sixth, Lower and Upper Eighth student (Years 9, 11, 12 & 13). The Hans Woyda’s main focus is speed, with seven sections of fast-paced questions. For instance, in the first section students only have 30 seconds to give their answers, and in the last section the first student to answer correctly gets all the points! The trials took place over multiple mornings and lunch breaks and students had to complete a time pressured test in order to claim a place in the St Paul’s squad. The top 3 students of each year group will each compete in one of the group matches of the Hans Woyda competition and will challenge other schools for the illustrious trophy. Here is a selection of some of the questions: