ICT in Education

What a fantastic day! It was the National Final of the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge and Elangeni School from Buckinghamshire are the National Primary Winners!!

The day started for me with a 90 minute journey from home and up the M40 to the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon. Pat Trowbridge also journeyed there – she is the link ICT Consultant for Elangeni and so was there to support her school. Schools arrived from 9.15 am and all were there and ready to go by 9.45 am.

There were introductions from Brian Richardson from Cambridgeshire Software House (CSH), who organises the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge and wrote the software along with Ian Whittington (who was also at the final) and then from a representative from Jaguar. After a few rules were mentioned (no calculators!) it was kicking-out time for all of the adults. We then had a couple of hours to wander around the motor museum whilst pupils worked away on their cars.

After a fabulous lunch we all gathered together again. There were some speeches and then there was the teachers race. Vicki, the teacher of the Elangeni pupils had bravely entered the race and, although she didn’t win, she successfully completed the race. Well done!

Finally it was the moment we’d all been waiting for, the race! Elangeni’s pupils had not felt confident when they came out before lunch, so we were all just hoping that they would manage to finish and not run out of fuel or crash. There is only one race in the final and all cars go into this. Each is clearly marked with the age range they are in – 1 for Primary, 2 for KS3 and 3 for KS4. The top team from each age range would be the winner wherever they finished in the race and the overall winner across all age ranges would of course be the team that finished in first place.

The race began… Elangeni were 22nd on the grid of 33 schools (11 from each age range). Although this doesn’t sound too good, they were the fourth placed primary school on the starting grid. The first few laps were dominated by KS3 and KS4 teams, which took the top 15 places (which is all the software displays). We could see from the text display though that Elangeni were jostling for position with other cars, overtaking some and giving way to others. After a few more laps a primary school appeared in 15th position. They then disappeared, then reappeared and continued this for a while. When we looked again, the primary that appeared in 15th position was Elangeni! Then to our amazement they didn’t disappear off the screen but instead climbed the positions! They then flitted between 4th and 6th place for several laps and in the meantime, only one other primary school made it into the top 15.

The final lap arrived and Elangeni hung on to their lead in the race against the other primaries. They were the National Primary Winners!! Overall they were 4th in the race – only 3 secondary teams did better than them. Conversely, Elangeni were better than 19 secondary teams and 10 primary teams! I must say that I did have a tear in my eye at that point!

Here are the finishing positions of the top 5 schools and where the second and third place primary schools came:

1st Longfield School, Darlington (KS4) 2h 19m 10s
2nd The Grove School, Nottinghamshire (KS4) 2h 19m 21s
3rd Weydon School, Surrey (KS3) 2h 19m 22s
4th Elangeni Primary School, Buckinghamshire (KS2) 2h 20m 21s
5th Chatham House Grammar School, Kent (KS4) 2h 20m 24s

15th Corpus Christi Catholic Primary School, Portsmouth (KS2) 2h 28m 13s
16th Meavy C.E. Primary School, Devon (KS2) 2h 31m 24s

So Elangeni were only 1m 11s behind the first place KS4 team and they were 7m 52s faster than the next placed primary team!!

Full details of the finishing positions (but not times) can be found on the Maths Challenge website.

The presentations followed and photos were taken. The top three schools in each age range received prizes. Elangeni’s prizes included and iDesk, Epson printer/scanner, Texas Instruments calculators, Pentax camera as well as book tokens, medals and Jaguar caps for the pupils.

Link to photos on the BucksGfL website

My congratulations go to Elangeni School, to Vicki who taught herself and then her class how to use the software, and of course to the pupils who did the hard work to get through the Buckinghamshire Knockout Round, the Buckinghamshire Final, the National Semi Final and then beat a total of 29 schools in the National Final to become the National Primary Champions for 2006-7 and overall the fourth best team across all age ranges. That’s no small feat considering that around 1000 schools took part in the Maths Challenge this year. To think they nearly didn’t make the final either – they got the 11th and last primary final place by just 0.69 seconds!!

I would also like to thank Brian & Wendy Richardson and their family for all of the work they put in to organise the final and run the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge each year. Without them none of this would happen.

So another year for the Maths Challenge is now over. It takes me some work in organising this in Buckinghamshire and at times I’ve been a little despondent when schools who have purchased the software have dropped out and so many other schools, especially the secondaries, just don’t seem interested in taking part. Today though has made it all worth it and gives me a renewed determination to run this again next year and to try and get more schools involved.

Who says maths is boring?! With Cars Maths in Motion it isn’t! So bring on the Maths Challenge 2007-8!!

Tags: Brian Richardson, Buckinghamshire, BucksGfL, Cambridgeshire Software House, Cars Maths in Motion, CSH, Ian Whittington, ICT, Jaguar, Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge, maths, Pat Trowbridge, primary