UKMT intermediate maths challenge?

DD (yr7) just got gold+best in school certificate on the UKMT. Not bad for a kid who couldn't recognise numbers above 7 when she started school. :)

It is amazing Jean, really really good and next year he will have an idea how to go further :)

DS just got results today, no medal but apparently v close to a bronze. He's typically disappointed .... flipping amazing if you ask me!

relaxitllbeok, A silver medal is a fantastic achievement. It is lovely to hear of such enthusiasm for maths.

AtiaoftheJulii, congratulations. I thought there were fewer get the book prize than get medals, so I'm thinking he must have got a medal. (Could be wrong)

Dd got nowhere near the medals, but at 10 years old, we were just pleased she got into the JMO.

Atia thats brilliant, really well done to him :)

Ds's school being a bit disorganised atm for some reason, and we were away for a couple of days this week so ds forgot to tell us, but just found out in the HM's weekly round up that he got a book prize for the JMO! Although he still doesn't know whether he's got a medal - am assuming he must have done, lol, but what colour is the question

That's great relax :)

Silver medal fantastic too :-)

Brilliant, tibicar's DD! Here's to much enjoyment of maths to come and many future successes. DS just heard he got a silver medal, which is more than he expected, so happy here too.

Fabulous tibicar, well done DD.

That's very fab indeed tibicar! Well done to her :)

tibicar, congratulations to your dd. Did she do the JMO in the same week as the GCSE? Dd did both in the same week. She knows she has not done well in the JMO as she did not answer many questions. (Still waiting results). How many times has your dd done the JMO?

Brilliant :)

DD just got her result for the Junior Olympiad. Gold medal and book prize. That means top 50 in the country. She got 51 marks.

Atia thank you for your suggestions :) would you mind if we take it to pm as it's getting quite outing?

Oh, also meant to say that nrich is a good resource for challenging problems, and you can send in solutions to unanswered ones which may get published (they're quite slow, ime!). There's also a forum nrich.maths.org/discus/messages/board-topics.html which could be useful to her - there used to be lots of UKMT-type people on it.

Plus there are threads on The Student Room about the UKMT challenges/olympiads, so they might be interesting to her.

I think the Problem Solver's Handbook is a good start, because it talks about types of questions and how to attack them.

The UKMT say that for intermediate pupils, mentoring is through the school. They have several months' worth of old mentoring questions www.ukmt.org.uk/mentoring/intermediate/ . If there's not a teacher at school with enough time to do something with her, is there a keen mathsy 6th former who might? Would look good on their UCAS form too

Ds has been seeing a y13 once a week, and they do all sorts of weird and wonderful maths, and his maths teacher has promised me he'll have one of the current y12s lined up soon for him!

That is worth knowing, I will do pythonesque. It does state no rough working but I think she could have written up her re-phrasing of the question.
She's actually becoming a bit serious about these competitions now - wants to do well. School are being supportive in as much as saying dd can do whatever she likes to prepare for them during lessons and they are seeking an external mentor but I think dd is a bit at sea on how to do it prepare other than working through the ukmt books. In fact I think we are all stumbling around in the dark a bit with none of us having any experience. I'd really welcome advice.

Referring back a month - OhyoubadKitten - let your daughter know that it's always worth putting in something (all your rough work if the test asks for it, for instance) - rephrasing the question is the correct starting point. At international olympiad level you can expect to get 1 mark (out of 7) if all you have done is indicated an understanding of the question.

Hope they made it ok and had all calmed down by the time they got there :) dh sent me this link earlier www.moretonhallschool.com/National-Final-of-the-Junior-Team-National-Maths-Challenge---Live-Blog , thought I'd share it.

Well that wasn't a great start to Team challenge finals day. They were booked on the 06:28 train which would have got them to London with plenty of time to get on the tube and walk to the hall before 10am start of registration. It was cancelled due to a fault on the train, so now they are barely going to make it for 11am and be stressed out. Oh well.

Atia: yes, all the team seem to have had a whale of a time.

tibicar: that still doesn't actually make sense; there are two more rounds of increasingly harder tests (Senior Kangaroo as lower follow-on from SMC, BMO1 for the top 1000, then BMO2 for the top 100 scorers in BMO2), without age limits and taken in students' own schools, before they'd have to go anywhere, and there's a huge gap between doing enough on the SMC for it to be fun taking it and being a high scorer on BMO2 ! Probably your DD's teacher was confused about the process; either that or just making an excuse, I'm afraid. But obviously your DD is in the system now; good luck to her in this autumn's SMC. DS did the SK last year and is also hoping to get to BMO1 next.

Atiaofthejulli. Found it on Wikipedia after asking. Bottom 50% is Participation, next 25% is Merit and top 25% is distinction.
Relax. I think he said that because if she'd managed to do well she wouldn't be able to attend the trials for Inernationals until age 11.

She is looking forward to the team finals. The subject for the poster comp looks complicated.

My son's going too - it looks like it should be a good day out - did your son enjoy it last year relax ?

tibicar from what I understand, Merit is the middle 50%. So if 1200 did the Cayley, then somewhere in the 300-900. The boundaries are on the IMOK page.

Has she done the JMC/JMO too this year?