On Wednesday 3^rd February, 135 girls from DGS took part in the Intermediate Mathematical Challenge. This is our largest cohort yet to take part in the Challenge! This was partly due to the girls taking part in the Challenge online at home. The Maths Department would firstly like to congratulate all our students who took part as they had to organise their own quiet working space to complete the Challenge and had to motivate themselves to prepare themselves for the Challenge beforehand. This definitely deserves to be celebrated! It’s amazing to see the girls still taking advantage of these opportunities even while working at home.

All our student did some amazing work on the Challenge, but 12 students deserve a special mention as they have qualified for the next round of the Challenge for their age category. Well done to Zenith, Charlotte, Keira, Lauren, Freya and Vidula from Year 9 who have all advanced to the Grey Kangaroo round. Well done to Emily and Hannah from Year 10 who have all advanced to the Pink Kangaroo round. Well done to Jess, Kate and Grace from Year 11 who have also advanced to the Pink Kangaroo round. A special mention goes to Lilia in Year 10 who has qualified for one of the Year 10 Olympiad! This is an amazing achievement as only 600 students in the country qualify for this.

This is what Lilia had to say about the Challenge:

“The Intermediate Mathematics Challenge provides an increasingly difficult set of questions to test your problem-solving skills. For me, the challenge was being faced with a general problem and having to think about and try different maths skills to find the solution. Problem solving skills are difficult to teach but doing practice questions and reading worked solutions and ideas really helped me to focus on the mindset of the challenge.”

We wish all the girls that qualified for the next rounds very best of luck in them!

It would be great to see even more of our students testing their Mathematical problem-solving skills. Past papers for the challenges are available on Dr Frost Maths, or student can complete Parallel tasks which also test their problem-solving skills!