MORE than 60 primary school students have tested their maths skills at challenge events hosted at Richmond School and Sixth Form College.

The first involved the students getting to grips with creative and robotics design in an interactive Lego Challenge.

The budding engineers worked in teams of three to build and program a robot to clear a 1m square area of 100 Lego bricks in two hours. Other teams of three had to demonstrate their creative skills by writing a skit on the theme of ‘In an amazing twists of events’ and then construct the set and characters, before performing the skit.

Students from Bolton-On-Swale, Michael Syddall, North Cowton, Richmond Methodist and Richmond Trinity all rose to the challenge and created some stunning designs and inspiring back stories. The project proved to be a great way of injecting fun into STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) with the students tackling the design challenges with enthusiasm. It was a wonderful team-building activity where the groups worked closely together developing their designs and building their final models.

The second event, Maths24, was a mental maths competition for gifted and talented students where the objective is to calculate the number 24 using all four numbers on special playing card. Years 5 and 6 students from nine schools took part in this secondary transition event and the students really enjoyed competing on an intellectual level. E

Professor Andrew Slade from Leeds Beckett University attended the event. He said: "The technological developments of today, mobile telephones, the internet amongst them are based upon advanced in many fields, including materials science and data science. These are both underpinned by advances in mathematics especially in data compression and modelling."

The competition was close and it was Wavell Primary School, Catterick Garrison, who won the competition for the third year in a row.