NUAST Maths department celebrates our Junior Maths Challenge results

NUAST maths department congratulates our year 7 and 8 Junior Maths challenge participants. (Maths - 31/05/2023)

On Wednesday 26th April, fifty-eight of our year 7 and 8 mathematicians took part in the 2023 UKMT Junior Maths Challenge. Three year 8 students Danyal, Ali and Rowan all won their 1st gold certificates with Danyal earning the best in school award and both he and Ali qualifying for the follow-on kangaroo competition in June. There were fifteen silver certificate winners including seven students from year 7 with Shahzai who narrowly missed out on a gold certificate, achieving the best in year 7 award. Twenty-two students earned bronze certificates.

The UKMT, based at Leeds University was founded in 1996 and its individual challenges involve over 700000 entries each year. The challenges are run annually at junior, intermediate and senior levels targeting students at different ages. These challenges are designed to promote a love for problem solving, encouraging mathematical reasoning, precision of thought, and fluency in using basic mathematical techniques to solve interesting problems. The problems on the challenges are designed to make students think and must be completed without a calculator. Regional team competitions run by UKMT have been suspended due to COVID since 2020 but we are looking forward to these re-starting next year.

Three of our favourite questions from this year’s junior challenge (remember – no calculators are allowed). Questions shared by kind permission of UKMT. More access to their past papers, including full solutions to the problems below, can be found at

https://www.ukmt.org.uk/competitions/solo/junior-mathematical-challenge/archive