Braeburn Inter-Schools Maths Challenge

Once again, the Primary and Secondary sections of our school got together for our Annual Maths Challenge. This is the second year that we have done this and the competition has gone from strength to strength. There were six schools competing: the Aga Khan Academy, Shree Swaminarayan Academy Mombasa, TradeWinds Academy, Oshwal Academy, Jaffery Academy Mombasa and BraeburnMombasa International School. It was exciting to have so many schools come together for an academically focused event that did not require travel to Nairobi. All the students from the smallest primary participant to the oldest in the under 16 age range worked hard and they all looked like they were enjoying themselves.

The Primary Maths Challenge

A huge congratulations to all our teams who participated, with questions covering a range of mathematical skills from problem solving tasks, multiplication recall and shape manipulation. 

Results in the Primary school: 

U8 team: Ishaan and Tamar - 1st place 

U9 team: Amina and Adam - joint 1st place

U10 team: Jasmine and Veer  - 1st place

U11 team: Alvin and Dev - joint 1st place

We are so proud of all these children - their hard work and resilience paid off, and we won the title of Primary winners! 

The BMIS Mathematics Challenge – What we did in the secondary school.

Like last year, the secondary Maths Challenge started with problem solving activities, the questions were a range of difficulties and awarded marks according to difficulty. The challenge level was high and a couple of the hardest questions have been used in top level UK Maths competitions in previous years. This was the most challenging part of the competition as it was not directly curriculum based and relied heavily on the student’s ability to apply their Mathematics to a wide range of unrelated problems. Problem solving is perhaps the most valuable and transferable of the skills that come with studying Mathematics. Following the problem solving we had an in-classroom quiz event where students selected from a question board and answered on individual whiteboards and a relay event where students were given one question at a time which they took to the marking teachers before getting their next question.

Every mark earned in the problem-solving section was of far higher worth than in the other sections, similarly the relay questions were often more challenging than the quiz questions which were more curriculum based (although not to any specific examination board). Due to this the marks each team earned in this section was not equivalent so we could not directly add the scores from the sections to find the winner, rather we awarded points for the places a team achieved in each event. These points were then added to find the age category winners.

We would like to congratulate all our competing students, whether they won or not. They have worked hard and shown an ability which led to them being selected to join this competition. That is worth congratulating in itself. The competition had all the best young Mathematicians from a wide range of highly respectable schools and the competition was tough, as one would hope for. We are also very pleased with the courage and willingness shown by two of our Year 9 students who stepped in to make up the Year 10 team and compete against children in an older age category. This is exactly the spirit that will take them where they want to go in life.

Results

Of course, we could not conclude our article without mentioning our first-place winners. You have shown both ability and determination and we celebrate your success. Well done to Braeburn’s own team for winning the Under 12 (Year 7) and Under 16 (Year 11), our other winners were Shree Swaminarayan Academy for Under 13 (Year 8); Tradewinds for Under 14 (Year 9) and the Aga Khan Academy for the Under 15 (Year 10).

Overall, in the secondary competition Tradewinds Academy came in first position, Braeburn Mombasa and Aga Khan Academy were in joint second place. After that was Oshwal Academy followed by the other schools in the competition.