July 13 2016 | Kent & Medway | Views: 1713
The inaugural Ursuline Primary School Mathematics Challenge took place on 13th July 2016. The primary schools attending were Garlinge, St Gregory’s and St Ethelbert’s.
The first activity was “Maths Magic” run by the ever popular presenter Derek Couzens. Derek “wowed” the students with an amazing range of hands-on mechanical and magic tricks which made the students think and question how did they work. The range of challenges included various tangrams, puzzles, assembling shapes and making a working model. All of which were successfully completed by the students.
The second challenge was to design and construct the tallest possible earthquake proof tower. This challenge was run by Marc Babin a design engineer from Tony Gee and Partners who is a STEM Ambassador. The equipment was kindly loaned by Kent & Medway STEM at Canterbury Christ Church University. After experimenting and identifying various design faults each of the groups constructed their towers. The tallest was built to a height of 56 cm and suffered no structural loss (falling down) when subjected to an earthquake of a magnitude 10 on the Ursuline scale.
The third and final challenge was code breaking run by Mrs Mansfield. Students had to crack various secret codes that have been used over the centuries by spy masters to pass on messages to field agents. After deciphering the codes the students were then sufficiently confident with the coding process to write their own secret messages. All students and staff had a great time and the students were asking to come back next year to do it all again.
