New free weekly maths challenges for bright kids aged 9-13 from Simon Singh

[noblegiraffe]

One of my favourite authors, Simon Singh, has just announced a set of weekly maths challenges for bright kids who want to do challenging maths that doesn't interfere with the school maths curriculum. The first set are now available, I've had a look and they're very nice - some maths jokes, some cool videos, a bit of history of maths and some maths challenge style problems.

parallel.org.uk

Hi, noble.
Thank you for introduction.
We tried to sign up for it today, but we need to type in ds's details.
For birth year, you can't type in, you need to choose from the list. But it goes only up to year 2005.(He was born in 2007.)
On the site, it says, it include primary children, so I don't think it actually limited to secondary children.
Part of me thinks it really doesn't matter and just choose any year, but also wondered if there are reasons for it??? (like American websites needing parental consent before joining under certain age.)

I signed up and put my year of birth in, I don't think it matters too much! In the about it says "This pilot version will run for only 4 weeks, but we hope to return in September with a continuous offering week after week designed for students in Y7 and Y8. In time, we hope to have materials that are accessible to all secondary students, right through to GCSE, and for children still in primary school."

You could probably email them and get them to change the year of birth thing as they are advertising it as 9-13.

Thanks noble. I sent the link to my y7 dd and she signed up by herself and started completing the activity. Never before has she engaged in any form of academic activity outside of school of her own accord!

Thank you!

Ds just done it, and he was giggling, smiling, having lots of fun.
He definitely enjoyed it and looking forward to the next ones.
Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks for sharing.

Emailed Simon, and got a reply that he will look into it. Thanks again.

Great, I'm pleased that DC are enjoying it!

Thank you noblegiraffe for the link. I hope he extends it soon for older children, up to GCSE age.
Dd has his book about maths in the Simpsons and loves it.

Hi, did everybody got results from the #1?
I am having a trouble, have sent emails, and got 2 emails back saying it's been sorted, and nothing after that. Still, ds cannot be able to see his results or solutions.
I totally understand the hardship they face when doing something new/making new web pages, so I don't want to pester them with too many emails. So just wanted to know about others.

Hi, the site seems to be working now and results are on the website, but I am still having difficulty finding solutions to the questions.
How do you access the solution to past set of questions?

If you go to the 1 2 3 4 on the left hand side of the page, these represent the question sets and it should take you to the marked questions and answers. Does that work?

Thank you,noble. But no, it only shows set of questions.
His results appeared only few days ago as well, so there might still be some problems? Any way, may need to contact them again.

He is having fun calculating 2^32 with pencil and paper at the moment. I can hear his exclamation how big the number is! Sounds fun!(not for me!)

Now he realised answer isn't 232 but 231 and having even more fun...