With the commonwealth games fast approaching, it was an academic challenge rather than physical that students at saltash.net community school’s Mathematics Department were faced with last month, and one that many rose to the challenge of.
At the core of the learning strategy in the department, is games based learning, and teachers use website ‘Manga High’ to aid this. “Manga High has been a great tool over the last year to encourage students to participate in extracurricular Mathematics, to compete against friends in their class, across the school, and across the globe to achieve a position on the leaderboard,” explained Enrichment Coordinator, Mr Scott Wieprecht.
‘The site uses medals as rewards, with students having to answer questions correctly to advance in difficulty from Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme levels. To achieve their virtual gold medals, students need to answer all 10 of the extreme questions correctly without any mistakes or hints.’
In May the ‘Manga High’ site ran its first ever UK competition where virtual rewards could reap physical prizes, the main prize being a real gold medal. “They set the bar very high,” added Mr Wieprecht. “When I heard they needed to earn 200, points I wasn’t confident it was achievable. It meant that a student needed to win no less than 67 gold medals in the online challenges, and with each one taking around 15 minutes to complete, it would require students to spend an hour every evening of the month doing extra Math’s on top of all their other homework!’
Three students from the school, however, not only made a valiant effort, but managed to complete the seemingly impossible, and received their Gold Medals. The students, Amelia Horne and Imogen James from Year 8, and Abigail Medland from Year 10, managed to secure the very lucrative award, and are amongst a very small number of students from across the whole of the UK.
Commenting on the successes of students, Mr Hawthorne, Head of Maths at saltash.net said, “There were a huge number of students who really worked hard on the challenge, and they all deserve congratulations. To get one gold medalist at the school was impressive, but to be able to claim three of the awards is incredible.”