Exceptional Learners

CAT Competition Results

The Computational and Algorithmic Thinking (CAT) competition is a one-hour problem solving competition designed to encourage student curiosity and promote multiple modes of thinking.

The competition is an ideal activity to encourage students to solve real-world problems. It is suitable for any mathematics class and the process helps students become more confident as they take on interesting new challenges. 

This year, five Year 11 boys entered the competition and they achieved some great results:

• Yang Zhang - High Distinction
• Justin Jeyarajah - Distinction
• Patrick Gleeson -  Distinction
• Matthew Cho - Credit
• Kevin Ye - Participation certificate 

The boys requested to participate in the competition and showed great determination and stamina to achieve these excellent results.

The competition has a mixture of multiple-choice and integer answers and incorporates unique ‘three-stage tasks’ that encourage students to develop informal algorithms and apply them to test data of increasing size or complexity. The original problems are designed to be quick to solve and highly approachable, and range in difficulty from very easy to challenging. Some questions test the ability to perform procedures, others require logical thought, while the more challenging problems require the identification and application of algorithms.