By Alice Jenkins, Year 10 Journalist Leader

On Friday, eight Year 10s went to Langley Grammar School, to participate in a ‘Maths Feast.’

After diligent training every Wednesday for a few weeks leading up to the event, we were all looking forward to a morning full of maths puzzles. Mr Quarmby kindly drove us in the mini-bus, meaning we were one of the first teams to arrive. This left us time to split up into two teams of four and get warmed up with a tricky maths crossword.

After the rules and layout of the day were explained, we started the first round: the ‘starter’ of our maths feast. Everybody in the team of four had one maths paper, with 5 minutes to answer as many questions as they could. The paper was then passed to the left, and you then had 4 minutes to answer as many answers as possible. This continued until everybody had seen all four papers, when we had 1 minute to discuss our answers. This round was definitely not NHEHS’ best! We did, however have much more success with the next round, which took place after a brief break and feast of biscuits. This was our ‘main course,’ aka the comprehension round. We had a double sided sheet explaining the basics of linear programming. From there, we had to answer a series of questions based on what we had learnt. One team came joint 1st with full marks, while the other team was not far off.

To round off the day, we finished with a delicious dessert of relay questions. In my team at least, this involved lots of shouting at the other team to HURRY UP!!! Despite losing a few friends in this round, we emerged reasonably content with our marks.

The focus of the day was not on competition but rather on having fun doing maths, meaning the final results were not announced.

Overall, it was tremendous fun! Thank you so much to Isabel, for coming and helping on the day; Mr Quarmby for driving us, and, of course, Ms Critcher for giving up her Wednesday evenings to help us prepare and accompanying us to Langley.