Maths Challenge

Again, the EBU, via its Regional and County Youth Officers in the North East, was invited to partake in the Tees Valley Maths Challenge organised by Tees Valley learn2work, an organisation aimed at encouraging learning through association with business and leisure companies.  A Minibridge challenge had been evolved some time ago which proved to be very popular with the pupils, such that the EBU is now automatically invited to partake in the five heats and final. In this years event the Minibridge challenge was voted the most popular by 85% of the pupils.

The Maths Challenge presented a golden opportunity to bring an awareness of bridge, both its pleasure and benefits, to approximately 40 schools in the area in a relatively easy and enjoyable way.

 Each school, say 8, partaking in a Maths Challenge heat provides a team of 4 pupils, age 14, to take on a series of challenges.  The teams are marked on teamwork, approach to the problems and answers.

 The Minibridge challenge is based on each school being given a five minute introduction to Minibridge based on the basic rules given on the back of the green EBU leaflet “Minibridge - an aid to numeracy and related skills for youth in school”.  This was supplemented by a summary sheet which gave honour card points, part and game score bonuses, trick point count and a guide to how many tricks you might make commensurate with a certain number of points.

 The challenge proved to be a fairly level playing field for all the teams, though 1 or 2 had mildly experienced kitchen bridge and quite a few did not know what a ‘trick’ was.  The main activity of counting points, deciding who was declarer or dummy, assessing the hand, deciding whether to be very safe in a 7+ part score or a little more risqué in a 9+ game score and how to tackle the problem of making the nominated tricks, all tended to have sufficient demands to largely nullify any slight prior knowledge of bridge, or even card games in general.  In fact a very good advert for the claim that even people who have not played cards before can be experiencing the essence of bridge via Minibridge, in a matter of minutes.

 The mechanics of the exercise was achieved by having 2 tables in play.  Each school was split into 2 pairs, each pair to compete against a pair of ‘experts’, each team playing exactly the same hand, given the same lead and as far as possible the same help and advice.  The ‘teamwork’ aspect and ‘approach to the problem’ was achieved by dummy, once dummy had placed his or her hand on the table, being sent around to declarer’s side so that they could decide target tricks, risks, understanding and play of the cards by mutual involvement.  They were then marked accordingly together with the number of tricks made in either a part or game score environment.  The following hand was used in the final, and it can be seen that sensibly, by luck and judgement, anywhere between 8/11 tricks can be made.  The QD was always led, and if you test the hearts first and play spades in the correct sequence you can make 11 tricks, otherwise it might only be 8.

Resulting from the above a lot of interest has been shown by the participating schools such that the main problem becomes the usual one, finding enough willing bridge players to support the interest. For people looking for a relatively easy way into a number of schools it is highly recommended to approach your LEA to see if there are any similar events to the above. The EBU is now effectively an annual fixture in the event, which opens up an enormous potential.