It was a battle of mental and physical speed as the Boys’ School Mathex got underway with two separate competition days – one each for the Middle and the Senior Schools.

Mathex isn’t just about ‘brain,’ it needs a little ‘brawn’ too! The annual inter-House competition tests the students’ arithmetic power and aerobic stamina. Here’s how it works: in small groups, they have to solve maths problems as fast as they can. When they think they have the answer, a nominated team member, the runner, sprints to the adjudicating desk to check the result. If it is correct, they earn five points and are given another question. If it is wrong, they can opt to try again, or pass on the question and forfeit those five points. The questions are tailored to the boys’ year level, but with the clock ticking they’re not as straight-forward to solve as in the classroom!

The pressure was on as the runners grabbed the answers and sprinted the circuit to the markers. With the timer ticking down, the cheers from the side-lines got louder and the teams more anguished as they pooled their mathematical skills to work as one, hoping they’d calculated correctly!

As the final buzzer went at each event, the points were tallied.  Whilst Chalmers won the Middle School competition and Hamilton won the Senior School, when both sets of results were combined, Hamilton was declared overall winner, holding onto the title for another year!

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