Maths Quest 2014 - Berlin, Germany - He Returned All Grown Up

Last Thursday morning I dropped off my ten year old boy at the Munich Hauptbahnhof (Central Station) with three other 5th graders and two teachers representing the Bavarian International School in this years Maths Quest. There were a total of 29 teams this year from all over the world.

"Maths Quest is a prestigious math competition for children under the age of 12 (grades 5-6) who attend an international school. The European Council of International Schools (ECIS) endorses this event. In 1996, Maths Quest was initiated by Monica Parker, a primary school teacher at King's College, Madrid. Maths Quest 2014 will continue to aim at maintaining her emphasis on children’s joy as they participate in a challenging math competition."

Here is the main floor of the Hbf in Munich. It was pretty intimidating the first time we saw it, and probably the second time too. Now that I have been a few times I am starting to know my way around. 

So that morning David and I rode the S-Bahn to Hbf and easily met up with the group. I could tell David was a little nervous and it was one of those times that the parent needs to leave because staying will just make it worse. (Flashback to daycare days) I gave him hugs goodbye and started to back away. As soon as he turned and started talking to the other team members it looked like he stopped thinking about it and was going to be fine. I forgot to get a picture of the group, but it worked out well to get out of there I think. 

The rest of the pictures are from the teachers during the trip. These two were on the train ride to Berlin. They played games and worked on math drills to prepare for the competition. Mudkips is the name of the stuffed dog in the pictures with David. It was one that he picked out while we were in Chamonix over Christmas. Both of the kids go nuts over that dog. 

It is about six and a half hours to get to Berlin on the train. This is one of the ICE trains that travels at times over 200k/h. Once they arrived they headed over to the Berlin Brandenburg International School where they met up with their host families. David and the two other boys were supposed to stay with one family, but they had someone get sick and at the last minute David ended up with one of the boys at a different house. The family that he stayed with had an older daughter going to BBIS. We were really worried about David and his picky eating habits going on this trip. When he went on the fifth grade trip to Salzburg earlier in the school year he only ate apples for three days. It sounds like he did okay this time. They had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, pizza one night, and a chicken with noodles dinner on the last night. We also had concerns about how he would behave at the host home, at the competition (if things were not going well for the team), and overall behavior being away from us. The thing we told him to keep in mind as he made decisions was that he is representing himself, representing his family, and representing his school. Not sure how well that is going to work, but that is the best we could come up with.  

After getting some rest the next morning was Friday, they first went to the BBIS for an orientation. David said his host family was about a 25 minute drive to the school. After the orientation the competition was on. The first round was called Math Trail. Three buses full of students spent the day in Berlin seeing sights and answering questions that were based on the places and exhibits that they were seeing that day. Pretty cool I thought. That is one way to get a bunch of 5th graders interested in museums.

They spent time at the Brandenburg Gate and the Museum of Technology among other places. One of the examples for the Math Trail questions was related to the museum and the airplanes on display. There were many airplanes on exhibit from all different eras. Each team had to figure out the percentage of airplanes that were built in the 1940's that were still in working condition out of all of the planes there. These were the pictures from the emails that we were receiving once or twice a day. The teachers were putting these collages together and sending them to the parents of team BIS.    

 After sightseeing competition on Friday, Saturday morning the competition was on. They had several rounds of competition from 9am until about 4:30 that afternoon. The rounds consisted of individual challenge rounds, team challenge, practical challenge, and the investigation challenge round. After a tough day they did get to spend some time unwinding at the gym playing games and letting off some steam.

 I loved getting these pictures. It was great to see David working hard and engaged in all of them.

The competition was pretty much over after Saturday. Sunday morning they did a team building challenge, except this each person was teamed up with three other students from three other schools. It was a nice way for the kids to spend some time meeting other kids from different parts of the world. The challenge was not part of the overall scoring. They were asked to build a replica of the Brandenburg Gate with toilet paper rolls, sticks and twine, etc. 

They wrapped up at BBIS and got on a train home around noon on Sunday. All of us were excited to see David and to hear about the trip so we all jumped on the S-Bahn to head to Munich. We got there way early because we had found a Mexican food restaurant close to the Hbf. It turned out to be a very small counter order place, but we still got our fix on burritos with chips and guacamole. As you might imagine it was not the best Mexican food ever, but was nice for a change.

It was all smiles as the team exited the train. Dawn Mountfield, the teacher that we have got to know well, was ear to ear smiles. It was a quick goodbye to the team and we were off to Unterschleissheim. David was non-stop talking on the train about the trip, and we kept having to tell him to speak softer. The host family had several pets and we think his allergies had him stopped up where he couldn't near himself. 

We knew this was going to be a great thing for David and hopefully something that he never forgets. I didn't realize just how much growing up he was going to do in a few short days. As a parent I am always eager to see my kids take responsibility and do things the right way, at least until they start doing it all themselves. Now I am not sure that I want him to grow up so much. We noticed a lot of little things that were different with David just on the train ride home. He was thinking ahead to the next day at school and what he needed to get ready when we got home. His thoughts were organized as he remembered to tell us some stuff that the teachers wanted us to know. When we got off of the train he stopped and looked around behind and below his seat to make sure he had all of his belongings. There were a bunch of just little things that were just a bit different, but good. We are still noticing the change a few days later as he seems to be taking on the challenge of his 9 week Exhibition project at school. He is even making choices to miss baseball practice since he has too much work for his project. Before he even left, we told David that we were proud of him just for making this team and wanting to spend a weekend for a math competition. After returning we could not be any prouder. He did well representing himself, his family, and his school. Great job David.

I think this was the first time that BIS has participated in this competition. They made a good showing by placing 9th overall out of 29 teams. David seemed to be happy with that result and so did the teachers. They all went into this not really knowing what to expect, so I think it is a great result. It just blows me away to think about my son in a competition against top math students his age from all over. One of the pictures above you can see the flags of the different teams represented, Germany, Spain, Switzerland. A team from the good ol' USA won the whole thing, go USA!

Ms. Mountfield used the train ride home to get David ready for Maths Quest 2015 in Oslo Norway!! Since David is a summer birthday and a young 5th grader, he will still be eligible to compete again next year. He sounds like he is on board, even though his parents need some time to get used to the idea.

The Ferguson Four are headed to Barcelona Spain on Friday. I am going to try and take everything I need with us so maybe I can blog day to day to make it fresh and less daunting after returning. There will not be much time after we return as a few days later we are headed back out to Venice. The kids are coming up on a two week break from school, so we are double dipping with our destinations.