Count On Us Challenge: Congratulations to Kender School!

Kender School in Lewisham are the winners of the Mayor’s Fund for London’s Count On Us Challenge.

Val from the Maths Zone takes on Johnny Ball
Val takes on Johnny Ball!

Very well done to them and very well done to all of the schools who took part. The grand final took place yesterday at City Hall with 13 schools who had won their way through heats and semi finals to compete at solving 24®Game puzzle cards. Each card has four numbers; you can add, subtract, multiply or divide in any combination, but you must use all four numbers to make 24.

It is quite astonishing to see pupils in years 4 and 5 (aged 8 to 10) able to solve these puzzles almost instantaneously. Their teachers certainly can’t, my PGCE students with top maths degrees can’t. So how is it done?

I talked with Bob Sun, inventor of the 24®Game in Easton, Pennsylvania and he gave me a copy of a book by journalist Daniel Coyle called The Talent Code. Coyle examines a series of instances in which exceptional performance is found in different fields and looks at the elements that came together to produce it. A great coach is always included, so teachers, you know you are important! However, the coming together of real desire and serious hard work with lots and lots of practice are the principle elements. In the end, the final few percent are achieved through an intangible element that can be called ‘talent’. But, for sure these kids can beat there teachers because they have worked hard at it.

Now, playing the 24®game is not like memorising your times tables. It involves flexibility of mind. You generate a whole raft of relationships which make up parts of the 24, like looking for 8 and 3 or 6 and 4, or 23 and 1 made up of pairs or triples of the numbers available. So, you are juggling lots of combinations. The outcome is young people who see numbers and are aren’t interested in seeing if they can remember the answer, but recognise the need to fiddle with what they’ve got to unlock routes to the answer. You can’t get more like true mathematical thinking than that in a 9 year old!

So, the Count On Us Challenge provides the desire. Compete for your school, win the prize, get to walk across the top of Tower Bridge. It doesn’t matter, it was a great day out for everyone, but everyone involved was ready to compete because they cared and they’d worked hard at it. Net result, 100s of young people with much better and more flexible number skills than their teachers. That’s good!

All of the 24®Game sets are only available from The Maths Zone. There are class kits, tournament packs, the competition standard one and two digit sets, primer sets for early practice and tougher sets for advanced challenges. 

There will be a Count on Us Challenge next year. So, start practising now. The kids from Kender School are very good. Very good indeed. They will take some beating! (And please don’t think it is a school with any special advantage, not at all, it is a very straightforward urban primary in SE London. They work hard at it and their kids practise and my are they sharp with their number skills. Well done to them.

We have produced a guide to help you run a number challenge tournament in your school or your area. You can use the 24®Game cards as they do in the Count On Us Challenge. If you want a more equally weighted tournament, we also have SuperTMatik, which is a card game from Portugal where they have a National (and World!) championship, but the problems are seeded so you can have pupil’s competing at different levels in the same game. Target Set 3 CMYKFinally there is Target Maths, where the numbers are combined to make a different target each time. Try this one (the target number is in the middle).

So, an in-school tournament to provide the desire, then plenty of opportunities to practice, practice and young people get really good. And then in secondary school what happens? They forget, because they stop practising. What does Andy Murray do before during and after every tournament? He practices hard. That’s why he is so good (and he may just have a bit of that extra few percent too!). It was humbling to see how good the kids from Kender (and indeed all of the other schools) are. Teachers can get all of their kids to that level with enough desire and a lot of practice. Good luck for next year!

 

 

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