The Cantamath competition at the Horncastle Arena was one of the best maths competitions we’ve ever done. The Year 7 team was made up of Aidan, Caerus, Jacob and Josh. The whole experience of Cantamath was amazing.

Throughout the whole competition, we were blasting through the questions apart from the last few when we were stuck on each one of them for a few minutes. We worked as a team really well most of the time. The question which stumped us the most was the last question. We were starting to make good progress on it when we realised the question meant something different. We then started to go very fast when we heard a shout from the MC: Medbury had finished and gained first place.

The MC started to count down from ten seconds. We hurriedly ran up with an answer but the marker looked at it and said “no”. Time was up, and we had solved 19 out of 20 questions. When they announced the final placings we discovered that we had placed second out of about 90 teams. We learnt that teamwork is extremely helpful and that persistence is just as important.

By Aidan, Caerus, Josh and Jacob

On August 28th, over 100 teams competed in the Cantamath competition. The Heaton Year 8 team, Bryan, James, Maddie and Rico, had won the Year 7 Cantamath competition in 2018 and we wanted to continue that winning streak. Once we got seated, there were a few prizes for people who could answer a warm up question. For us, it was ‘What is the sum of the first 5 prime numbers?’ Our team got it correct and won some Malteasers.

When the competition started for real, we were continually getting points but the Ashburton team always stayed 1 or 2 questions ahead of us. We were stuck on question 15 for about 10-15 minutes but over time we eventually got it and we were soon tied with our closest rivals. Similar to the Year 7 team in the Year 7 competition, we were all on the last question and as the MC said that there were 15 seconds left we sent up an answer and the marker said it was correct!

We had just won the competition for Heaton for the second time in a row. This felt very good and even though we’ll be going to different schools next year, we’ll still hopefully do well in Cantamath for our new schools.

By Bryan and James