Karachi round of inaugural Dawn Math Challenge held

Schoolchildren take part in the competition on Saturday.—White Star

KARACHI: Can you solve this question? “An outlet pipe can drain a pool in 12 hours. An inlet pipe can fill the same pool in eight hours. If both pipes are open how long will it take to fill the pool?” Come on try. You have two minutes. No? Okay, how about this? “A melon slice weighs 5kg, and 95% of the weight is from water. After lying in the sun, water makes up 75% of its weight. What is the new weight of the slice?” Too difficult? Alright then, just write 1948 in Roman numerals.

Well, if you can’t come up with an answer to any of these questions just know that there are schoolchildren working out the answers and they are getting them right, too.

Organised by the Dawn Media Group and EDeQUAL, Math Challenge ‘18 is a national inter-school competition for students of classes seven, eight, nine and 10, providing them a platform to demonstrate their intellectual, analytical and problem-solving skills using math.

Over 150 schools across Pakistan are participating in the competition, including government schools.

The first round of the competition was successfully completed in January within each of the participating schools using a technology link-up that was managed by EDeQUAL. About 6,500 students from across schools in Karachi, Hyderabad, Lahore, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Jhang, Islamabad and Peshawar participated in the first round.

School teams comprising each school’s top scorers competed on Saturday in the second round of the challenge, the regionals.

The Karachi regional round at the Karachi School of Business & Leadership (KSBL) saw two groups participating.

Classes seven and eight constituted group one and classes nine and 10 constituted group two.

The competition also comprised two sessions — Hot Spot and Jeopardy — with different rules and points.

Hot Spot had nine questions and three minutes to answer each. The first school team to hit the buzzer answered. The correct answer earned them 10 points, but if they got it wrong 10 points were subtracted from their total points. This got several teams into minus points even before they could open their account. The easiest calculations were left to the host Mr Amin Jan, who kept subtracting 10 points. Of course, he knew addition too but he was not being given many opportunities to do that.

But the Jeopardy round helped the students come back into the competition.

Arisha Ferhaj and Saleha Abid of Habib Girls School deserved all credit here. Both girls kept a cool head and pressed the buzzer to answer only when they were sure. They built the winning score of 145 points.

The runners-up, Aman Meherally and Mohammad Zohair of BVS Parsi High School were 100 points behind them, but luckily for them the other teams were even more behind.

Ali Habib, marketing director of UBL, the chief guest on the occasion, gave away the prizes.

The top 12 teams in each of the groups across Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad will now proceed to the national finals in Karachi on Monday.

Following are the names of schools which qualified for the finals/nationals:

Group one (classes seven and eight):