On Tuesday 30th September, we welcomed Emanuel School for the first official match of the 2025-26 Hans Woyda competition. The SPS team of Aryan (4th), Rafael (6th), Zicheng (L8th) and Aman (U8th) were already warmed up from the friendly against SPGS, and they were further buoyed by the support of Adavya, William and Andrew who came to spectate (along with the inimitable Dr Stoyanov). The team assisted me in arranging the classroom into my famous Battle Chevron formation (patent pending) before taking their seats to await their opponents. Once the Emanuel team had arrived and settled into their places we had a momentary pause while one of the tables was adjusted to avoid a stream of sunlight going directly into their Year 12’s eyes (which I insisted was not a deliberate act of sabotage!), after which I projected the slides, hushed the audience and handed out the first set of questions.
SPS hit the ground running with a perfect set of answers to the first four starter questions, while Emanuel tripped over a fiddly logarithm and a rare appearance of the slightly more exotic (8, 15, 17) Pythagorean triple. However, they took the setback in their stride, and both sides sailed through the remaining starters without any further mistakes. Up next was the geometry section, which is typically one of the toughest sections in the match. Incredibly, SPS kept up their perfect streak, getting all four questions correct, but once again a couple of slips from Emanuel caused them to fall further behind, this time with the more common (5, 12, 13) Pythagorean triple giving them some issues. For the mental arithmetic and probability section the Year 9 and Year 11 questions had to be done without any working, but Aryan and Rafael kept their cool, with both sides comfortably solving their questions in their heads. Pen and paper were mercifully allowed for the Year 12 and Year 13 probability questions, and Zicheng got things off to a flying start by stealing a point from Emanuel after they made a mistake on a question involving a fairground game about throwing a circular disc onto a square grid of lines. Unfortunately he ended up being bested by the very next question when the grid gained some width, and while Aman got his own question about prime dice rolls correct, he also missed an opportunity to steal a point after a cancellation error on a question involving a hand of cards. The team question brought us to the halfway mark with an entertaining iteration of the classic “Four fours” problem, with the teams tasked with constructing as many of the numbers from 1 to 38 as they could using only the digits of 2025; both sides ended up with an impressive array of solutions, but SPS managed to get 28 of the possible answers out with some ingenious applications of 0! (which of course is 1 for the uninitiated). That gave them the higher score and allowed them to pick up two bonus marks, further increasing our lead as we entered the second half of the match.
After a quick break for sandwiches and cakes, as well as a quick readjustment of the tables to avoid the drifting sunshine which had crept back into a perfect blinding position, the teams settled back down for the calculator section. These all concerned series, offering a significant advantage to those pupils who had mastered the sigma buttons on their calculators, and clearly SPS were more comfortable with theirs, with only a single mistake across the four questions. Next we had the algebra and calculus section where all the questions involved a function which takes in two numbers and spits out the remainder of one when divided by the other. Both Year 9’s were happy with their questions, but a slip by Rafael allowed Emanuel to steal back a point and start to close the gap between the two teams. However, Zicheng gave them no further opportunities to do so, and Aman went a step further, making up for his earlier missed opportunity and stealing back a point on the last question of the section. Our lead was insurmountable at this point, allowing me to enjoy the rare experience of a stress-free race section, but Emanuel still came out swinging, beating both Aryan and Rafael to the punch and flying through the arithmetic of the first two questions. However, Zicheng and Aman stopped them in their tracks, and Aryan and Rafael got their own back on questions 5 and 6 with some deftly handled square numbers and an astonishingly rapid simplification of indices from Rafael. The Emanuel Year 12 snuck in one last question with some tricky surds manipulation, but Aman finished the match off with a flourish by spotting the classic disappearing trigonometric integral trick, sealing the SPS victory with an astonishing final score of 63 – 39.
- Mr Cullen-Hewitt
