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The Integral Maths Ritangle Competition

There’s a new kid on the school mathematics competition block, and I am pretty excited about it.

The great A-Level resource site integralmaths have recently announced a new competition for Sixth Form students called Ritangle . As part of this competition 23 questions are going to be released on 23 consecutive days and you need the answer to all of them to be able to work out the 23 character string to be submitted. You can download the poster for the competition (shown below) from the IntegralMaths website screenshot-2016-11-01-22-10-01

 

Ritangle have released 5 preliminary practise questions, the last of which went live today: prelime_twitter

I like this question; it is fairly accessible but sufficiently challenging to be interesting to solve. My students loved solving the first 4 preliminary questions. I say they are for practise, but correct answers to the first 5 will unlock a clue for the main competition.

One aspect of this competition, that is different to other competitions, is the encouragement to use technology to help with solving the problems. Being a computer coder and someone who enjoys computational maths this excites me. I hope that during the competition I will be able to blog a couple of times about the use of technology. Of course, in the spirit of the competition I won’t be able to discuss methods to solve directly competition problems, but I will be able to talk about computational techniques in general.

I’m really excited by this competition, and am pleased that some of our A-Level students want to to take part. I would encourage you (if you are an A-Level Teacher) to see if your pupils want to take part. If the preliminary questions are anything to go by then there are going to be some great problems to solve.