On Tuesday 24th September 2024, Kirkcaldy High School’s Enterprising Maths team set off for a day of maths challenges at Madras College. The team consisted of two S3 students and two S4 students. We took a quick stop at St Andrews High School to pick up some competitors, then headed off to join the traffic up through beautiful Fife. We took a slight accidental detour, but thoroughly enjoyed our unauthorised jaunt through the delivery areas of the St Andrews University buildings.
The competition consisted of four rounds, plus bonus points for the best poster.
In the first round, we worked together as a team to solve 8 different maths problems. These were ones we had practiced in class. We scored full marks! We were off to a flying start.
The second round was a speed round. We had to spend 8 minutes at a table working through a puzzle, before moving on to another table with another puzzle, and repeating this until we had completed 8 puzzles. We had another high score in this round, and a teacher from another school commented on our good our teamwork was. We went into lunch in 7th place.
At lunchtime, we practiced for the practical round that would be next. We had been worrying over this for weeks, as we knew it wasn’t our strong point. We knew it involved Columbus Cubes, but none of us were very good at making them! Our lunchtime revision session helped us, as one of the S4 students finally cracked it. We found out that we had to build towers from the cubes, with more points for every layer we added. “We thought we would get zero!”, exclaimed one of the S3 students, happy to see that we had scored a total of 45 points. Our tower was 3 cubes tall. We have attached a picture of a 9-cube tower – we could only dream of such heights. It was harder than it looked and other teams were thinking outside of the box on this one. One school made smaller cubes so they would balance better. Another school were licking their cubes like envelopes to help them stick!
The last round was a relay race. We split ourselves into two sub-teams, and had to answer alternate questions, racing across the room to pass answers to each other. This round ultimately let us down, as we scored very low in it. Two of the schools got more than 200 points, and most schools got around 100 points. We are working on a strategy for next year to help us efficiently gain lots more points!
Throughout the competition, teachers had been voting for their favourite poster. We had worked on our poster for months, in our spare time. The theme was “Maths Tales”, and we had created a poster called “The Tale of How Maths Saved World War 2”. The posters had a tiebreak for first place, and it ultimately went to a poster about “Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. We later found out we had been part of the tiebreak! Unfortunately, there were no points for the second-best poster.
Our trip home was a happy one. St Andrews had scored highly in the competition, and we are always pleased to get to know our neighbouring schools. We send a big thank you to Mr Miller for organising everything for St Andrews High School! We were also in good spirits after achieving our goal of ranking higher than the last time KHS entered Enterprising Maths. Miss Barclay and the Maths Department are very proud of everything we accomplished today and would love to see more people as enthusiastic as we are about maths!
