Mathematics

Pi Day

It’s been a busy few weeks for the Maths department at St Bede’s College, with subject selections, national competitions and one very important day for Year 7’s on 22 July.

First, congratulations to Flynn Morley, William Devlin, William Bunn, Declan Dawson and Sam Murray who during Term 2 competed in the Mathematics Challenge for Young Australians. These Year 8 students were given six complex problem solving questions which they had work through over a three-week period. Flynn Morley was our highest achieving student, scoring in the 95th percentile, but a fantastic effort by all students involved.

Those who are familiar with the Mathematical constant π (pronounced ‘pi’) may know that it can be approximated by the fraction twenty-two over seven (3.14).  It’s for this reason that 22 July is known by Mathematicians as ‘Pi Day’ and each year the Year 7 Maths classes celebrate this milestone with a full day of Maths related activities. I’ll let Sam Valentine, Mitchell Murphy and Tomas Cooling tell you the rest in their own words:

As you may know, on Friday 22 July (Pi Day), Year 7 held the annual tradition of Maths Activities Day. A lot of fun activities were organised, with the help of the Maths staff and Year 8 assistants, for us to enjoy. These activities included Letters & Numbers, where we had to make different combinations of sums/words with the given numbers/symbols/letters. There was also Maths Trivia, where we were shown a series of questions about Maths (including some involving Mario Kart/Flappy Golf), and we had to answer them to the best of our ability. The third event was the Maths Relay, where each team answered a number of questions, rapid-fire, running up and down the room to collect them from our Year 8 judges. The final activity was 'The Amazing Race’. In this event, we ran around the school looking for clues to answer questions using QR codes we scanned from our iPads. Highlights included the Tug-of-War competition and trying to solve a massive puzzle. 

At the end of the day, we held a  year level assembly, and had a visit from a world-renowned mathematician, Professor Humphrey St Paul himself!! (Not Mr Wilson in a beard, we promise). Congratulations to 7.3 for winning the Pi-themed cake and the trophy for 2016. On behalf of Year 7 we’d like to thank everyone who participated and helped to organise the day, and we hope we are able to volunteer to help as Year 8’s next year!

The other major event early in Term 3 was the Australian Mathematics Competition. Run by the Australian Mathematics Trust and held in schools all across the country, the competition is one of the largest of its kind, taking entrants from Primary School all the way up to Year 12. This year we had over 100 students in Years 7 and 8 competing in the Junior division and 40 Year 9 students in the Intermediate division. Each student is given 75 minutes to answer a series of 30 problems of increasing difficulty. The harder the question, the more points you receive. It’s a big ask for students to take the morning away from their regular classes and spend two periods doing a very challenging Maths test, so I’d like to thank all of the students who entered the competition. The results will be announced later in the term. If you’d like to see a sample question, here are a couple from last year’s paper:

Zoltan has a list of whole numbers, all larger than 0 but smaller than 1000. He notices that every number in his list is either one-third of another number in the list or three times another number in the list. What is the largest number of different whole numbers that can be on Zoltan’s list?

At a football match, one-third of spectators support the Reds and the rest support the Blues. At half-time 345 Blues supporters leave because their team is losing, and the remaining Blues supporters now make up one-third of the total. How many Reds supporters are there?

You’ll find the answers on College Events page of this newsletter.

Ben Wilson

Acting Mathematics Co-ordinator