At the end of last Friday 7th November, I met the second iteration of the SPS Hans Woyda team in the atrium as we prepared for the unusually short journey to our first away match of the season. Unfortunately this meant that there was barely any time for me to pester Haoming (4th), Ehan (6th), Andrew (L8th) and William (U8th) with warmup questions on the trip over, and before I had even managed to get through three sections’ worth we had arrived at Harrodian. After a brief walk through the site to the prepared classroom (during which I admitted, to my embarrassment, that after eight years at St Paul’s I had never stopped to wonder where the name of our neighbouring school comes from!) the team took their seats and the match got underway.
Both teams had a strong start, getting three out of the first four questions correct, with a counting slip on our part made up for by a summation slip on theirs. The next four starter questions caused a few more problems on both sides, not least because two of them were actually geometry questions (the Achilles heel of most Hans Woyda teams), and the only marks gained were by the two Year 13s who realised that the integral they were faced with was much more straightforward than it first appeared! The actual geometry section was up next, and the lack of success on the geometry questions from the starter section suggested that this might not be a strong suit for either team. This turned out to be the case, with both sides failing to solve a single question about their mathematically similar stacks of shapes, leaving us on level pegging as we entered the mental arithmetic and probability section. Here, however, Haoming pounced on an opportunity to steal some points from his opposite number after they made a mistake calculating the square root of 729 in their heads, catapulting us into the lead, and while William didn’t manage to steal the point offered up by his opponent’s failure to find the cube root of 17576, he did at least find the correct cube root of 132651 to help extend that lead even further. The team question allowed us to extend that lead further still, both due to our side’s impressive knowledge of the period of recurring decimals and due to an unfortunate mistake by Harrodian that caused them to throw away a few marks unnecessarily.
The teams replenished themselves with the provided platter of biscuits and Jaffa cakes, after which we settled back down for the calculator section. Once again this concerned summing various series, and once again a lack of familiarity with the sigma button left most pupils doing far more work than they needed to, with the exception of William, who found it so easy as a result that he worried he had inadvertently cheated! Regardless, we still managed to get three out of four correct, and since Harrodian only got one of the four we were now comfortably ahead. The algebra and calculus section all concerned a pair of functions which returned the smallest square or cube greater than or equal to the input, and both teams quickly got to grips with it, with almost all questions answered correctly. The only slip was on the penultimate question, and while neither side got it correct it did allow Harrodian to narrow the gap ever so slightly going into the race. We were still quite far ahead, but a strong race performance could see Harrodian take the win, and their coach had mentioned that they came back from behind in their last race section so I wasn’t going to be complacent. Indeed, while Haoming’s lightning fast percentage calculation won us the first two points, Ehan misread his own working on the following factorial question which kept Harrodian in the running. However, Andrew’s quick prime factor counting took us clear, and William followed it up with a very speedy factorial summation to ensure that there was no way Harrodian could close the gap. Haoming extended the gap further on his final question, but both Ehan and Andrew were a bit too cavalier with their next questions, answering blisteringly fast but making some small miscalculations as a result. The Harrodian Year 13 then beat William to the punch on the last question of the match, but we still won by a significant margin, with a final score of 44 – 29.
Look out for the report of our final group round at the end of the month, when we will be home again against The London Oratory School. In here is the final question which Harrodian stole from under our noses; can you spot the trick required to write the answer down immediately?
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