What is the least number of times you can flip a stack of five pancakes in order to put them in order by height? The answer is five. Is there a pattern to this number when there are different number of pancakes? No one knows. Students from the seventh and eighth grade math club traveled to Bratislava, Slovakia to participate and compete in a weekend of math from April 28 to 30. At the ISMTF competition, there were 156 students in 52 teams from 28 different schools, and six students from ASL were present: seventh graders Rachel Brooks, Jack Roberts, Jason Covey, and eighth graders Ethan Otero, Hailey Vice, and Mackensie Kim. They were split into two teams of girls and boys. Mr. Dylan Chambers, a seventh grade math teacher and mentor of the group, and eighth grade math teacher Mrs. Wendy Kraft also attended.
“The competition is great,” Mr. Chambers said. “I think it’s fantastic to get so many people from so many schools together and enjoy doing maths problems in groups.”
The main focus of the trip was on the competition, but the team had time to be together and bond. The competition was in teams of three and the groups had to work on problems together, something that can be different from math class. On April 29, the teams competed by solving problems. There were 10 rounds of questions, in different formats and on different topics. Mr. Chambers had submitted a problem, and it was inclu ded in one of the rounds.
After the competition ended, there were several workshops for students to do, including folding paper into dodecahedrons and puzzles that involved using logic to solve them. Katie Steckles, a mathematician, also presented some unsolved problems in math.
The main event on April 30 was the Sunday Chase. In this activity, students were put into groups with people from different schools. They had to run around the city of Bratislava to try and solve problems in the shortest time possible. “It was a lot of fun… to meet new people,” Covey said. “[It was] quite interesting to see how they worked some of the problems out.”
After the competition was over, the team explored Bratislava, including taking a tour of the city in a trolleybus. They got to see a castle which overlooked the city, and the team also played a version of chess on a life sized chessboard in the city.
While the teachers and students from ASL were traveling back to London, the scores for the teams in the competition were announced. Mr. Chambers announced to the two teams that they had tied for twelfth place with the same score. “I was overwhelmed with joy,” said Otero.
The students all congratulated each other and celebrated together. “There was just this air of being together,” said Vice.
Mr. Chambers hoped that during the trip, “Students, first of all, would have a good time, enjoy the trip and… get to meet students with similar interests from different schools. I also hoped that they would enjoy the competition and work together as a group and have fun doing some maths.”
