South East Asian Maths Competition 2017

The beginning of March saw six dedicated students travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Jakarta, Indonesia to compete in the 2017 SEAMC competition. Mee Hyang Kim, Cedric Chua and Arun Ramanathan formed the year 10 team, with Sea Hyun Kim, Junseop Lim and Yoon Su Jang forming the year 9 team. 

The students left excited and nervous for the two days of competition ahead! We were welcomed to the event with an evening of dinner and ice breaker challenges. Special mention must be given to Sae Hyun, Yoon Su and Junseop for winning individual parts of the evenings activities. Everyone went to bed excited but exhausted!

Hello from Jakarta!
Congrats to Sae Hyun, Billy and Yoon Su for winning one of the initial rounds! Looking forward to competition time... pic.twitter.com/pykdEjjaVk

— BIS HCMC Maths (@BISHCMC_Maths) March 2, 2017

The next day all 200 students began the competition at BIS Jakarta school. The first day of events saw the students take part in individual rounds, and an introduction to the long term questions. This required the competitors to answer some (incredibly difficult!) open ended questions in their very limited spare time, and produce a poster summarising their answers. Some very tired students meant all lights out by 10pm!

Competition time!
Day 1 of SEAMC 2017, Jakarta, saw 6 BIS students competing in individual and "passback" rounds. Very challenging maths! pic.twitter.com/dn3K11RbXW

— BIS HCMC Maths (@BISHCMC_Maths) March 3, 2017

With the final day of competition in full flow, energy was at an all-time high. The students competed in team rounds like the “pass-back challenge” and the “energiser round”. During the codebreaker event, the year 10 team of Cedric, Mee Hyang and Arun made it to the final round, which was to be carried out at the Gala dinner in front of all students and teachers. Our three representatives did fantastically well, managing to come in 2^nd place out of 80 teams in total. An absolutely fantastic result!

Congratulations to all the BIS HCMC students who took part. As a team we left with 6 medals – several from the individual rounds, the code breaker round and one from the long term questions. 

All in all, a fantastic weekend spent with some really energetic and enthusiastic Mathematics students.

Looking ahead to next year, we are hopefully going to enter teams into the SEAMC and SEAMC plus competition. If you are keen on going up against some of the best Mathematicians in Asia, please come along to the trials which will be held in the first term of the next academic year.

Mr James Quarrington, Maths Teacher