Straight From Jake!: Off On A Maths Quest To Barcelona...

My school entered into a really creative math competition called Maths Quest where schools from across Europe and even one from the US compete and earn points across 3 days to see who wins the top 3 team prizes and the overall individual prize. In my school, there were tryouts for the 4 slots for this team and I made the team along with my friends Nikhil, Aman and Michael to represent our school.

This is us making our own energy riding the bikes at the airport
to recharge our electronic devices

Maths Quest is a math competition which originated out of the schools in Europe and which is hosted in a different European country each year and this year's competition was hosted in Barcelona. So we were able to fly to Barcelona together for the competition.

This wasn't as easy as it sounds because of the craziness that had happened not that long before at the Brussels airport. Plus the airtraffic controllers had decided to strike and were only letting so many planes take off each day and they weren't telling anybody which ones those were going to be until right before, so we weren't even sure we were going to get to go. But, in the end we got there.

When we arrived, we met our host family and then they took us out to get something to eat and we had ice cream and went to see some famous historical sites in Barcelona.

They showed us around where they lived and we got to know them and their family.

The next day, we woke up and went to the school to meet up with our team and start the competition. That first day, one of the activities was the math trail were we went though an outdoor re-creation of an old Spanish city which was like a really big museum. All along the trail there were challenging math type questions and challenges we had to solve as a team. The picture below shows us working on one.

Different parts of the competition were held in various parts of Barcelona and it was all arranged and hosted by one of the international schools there. It lasted for 3 days and on the final day, we were paired up to work with kids that were from other schools for the final challenge.

Our team came in fifth out of 22 teams and I came in 5th out of 88 kids. The other teams had all done the competition before so they knew what to expect, none of us had done it before and our teacher hadn't either so it was all new to us so we had to figure everything out for the very first time. And it wasn't like any kind of regular math type things we had every seen. So we were very happy to have finished so high and we're excited to go back next year because now that we do know how it works, we're going to CRUSH it next year!!!!!

While we were there, we stayed with a girl called Daniella and her family who was really nice for 3 nights. Every night they gave us dinner and we slept at their home and then they fed us breakfast and took us all back to the school in the morning. Here is Daniella and her mom and dad and my teammate Michael who stayed there with me as well.

Here we are at the closing ceremony...all that math and we are still smiling!

Mom was there and she helped to chaperone us on the plane and in the airport on the way there and back, but she wasn't allowed to come and watch except for the closing ceremony. While I was there I also discovered I liked horchata...do you know what that is? You should try some!!!