Student Journalist- Natasha:  Australian Mathematics Competition

A couple months ago I came to a problem where I found school boring. Not because of how you think I found it boring. I found it boring because I already knew most of what I was being taught, so I told Mr. Sharp. He reflected, and decided to provide me with a challenge.

Giselle, Kobee, myself and 6 other kids from St Paul's Apostle North were entered into the Australian Mathematics Competition. Every Wednesday, for four weeks we all went to St John’s. The way that the competition worked was we were given a booklet with all the problems we had to solve. There were four different topics and each topic had four different questions. Every week, we would do one section trying to answer all the questions. For every question you get right, you get one point and every question gets harder.

The first week we went we got introduced to Mr Turnbull who was the teacher who would be explaining and assisting  us with all the questions but he was not allowed to give us the answer of course.The first section we did was about right angles and having to make a certain amount of angles.The second section was similar to a game called Fill-a-pix where certain squares are shaded in and you have to put a number of how many squares that specific squares was touching and we had to arrange them in a specific  way.

The third week we went we used peg boards and made triangles in different ways. During the last week the section was about time where you had to write down certain times and you weren't permitted to use the number three and the seconds couldn’t go over 2 digits.

Overall I found the questions hard but fun and school has been getting better as I have another challenge to write an article for the school newsletter which I look forward to doing more of.

 I think all children should be able to voice their challenges whether they find school hard or easy and teachers should be able to help them with that.

Lastly, I would like to thank St Johns for this amazing opportunity and Mr Turnbull for helping us with all the math problems.