Skip to Main Content
  1. Home
  2. News
  3. UGDSB students excel at national math contest

UGDSB students excel at national math contest

April 6, 2017

GUELPH, Ontario – Four students in the Upper Grand District School Board have placed among the best in the country in competitive national math contests.

The Pascal, Cayley and Fermat Mathematics Contests are organized by the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC) at the University of Waterloo. The contests are meant to be an opportunity for students to develop their problem-solving ability in a fun environment.

Many UGDSB students, across a number of grades, elected to write the tests in their home school on Feb. 28, 2017.

Andy, a grade 8 student at École Arbour Vista Public School wrote the Cayley contest, open to students in grade 10 or below. He finished as one of the 15 student champions, out of nearly 24,500 participants.

Numerous students from Centennial CVI participated in the math contests. The team of Yun Chi Tang, Louisy Lu, and Timmy Zhu placed first in the province and third nationally in the Fermat contest, open to students in grade 11 or below.

Yun Chi, who is currently in grade 10 but elected to write the grade 11 contest, also finished as one of 14 student champions in the Fermat contest, out of more than 21,000 participants.

The initial questions in the contests are meant to test concepts found in the curriculum common to all provinces in Canada. Subsequent questions test ingenuity and insight. All of the questions focused less so on content and more so on testing the students’ logical thinking and mathematical problem solving.

The contest problems were developed by Problems Committees, made up largely of active secondary school teachers from across the country who volunteer their time to create “intriguing and sometimes amusing problems,” according to the CEMC.

Students can prepare for the contests in a variety of ways, by participating in their school’s Math Club and working on problems as a group, taking previous math contests available online, and practicing math work at home.

Congratulations to Andy, Yun Chi, Louisy and Timmy, and all of the UGDSB students who participated in the contests.

Categories: News