Mathematics Competitions have Begun!

The year is up and running and Mathematics classes are in full swing, the Honours Program has commenced in Years 5 to 9, support classes are working hard to master both skills and concepts and many competitions have begun. We have girls already entered into

• The Maths Challenge – a three week problem solving competition set by the Australian Maths Trust. This has already commenced for some year levels.
• The Computational and Algorithmic Thinking competition ( more on this below)
• The Enrichment stage of the Mathematics Challenge for Young Australians which runs over Terms 2 and 3
• The Australian Mathematics Competition in July
• The International Mathematical Modelling competition. Our team is starting their problem late April. This is for Year 11 and 12 students only.
• The Big Data Challenge Day (for Year 12 only, working in one of the three areas of Actuarial Science, Business Analytics or Econonmetrics.)
• The University of Melbourne School Mathematics Competition in May,

On Tuesday, the Computational and Algorithmic Thinking Competition (CAT) was held and a number of our students from Years 7 to 12 took part. Algorithmic thinking has been one of the growth areas in Mathematics over the last few years. The CAT competition is a one-hour problem-solving competition which seeks to identify computer programming potential, an area the Australian Government is keen to promote.

Algorithms are instructions or rules that, if followed precisely either by a person or computer, leads to answers to both the original and similar questions.

For example, we all learn algorithms for doing multiplication at school. If we (or a computer) follow the rules we were taught precisely we can get the answer to any multiplication problem. Once we have the algorithm we no longer need to work out how to do multiplication from scratch each time we are faced with a new problem.

Why not download these Mathematics problems and see how you go?