Hamilton maths challenge
At a recent visit to the Hamilton Institute at NUIM, we heard about the Hamilton Mathematics Grand Challenge. This is an outreach programme developed by the researchers there, and funded partly by SFI.
The idea behind the programme is to get secondary school children to participate in solving maths and logic puzzles. The puzzles are issued once a week during the school year, and children from participating schools submit their answers through a web-based form. At the end of the year, the top student in each school wins a prize of an Apple iPod, and the winning school will also win a prize.
The uptake of this programme appears to be excellent, with 2,500 pupils registered for this year’s competition, from about 30 invited schools. In fact, the competition is proving so popular that the guys in the Hamilton are getting phone calls from schools asking why they weren’t invited to participate. Hopefully over the next year or two the challenge can be rolled out on a wider scale – perhaps even nationwide.