This is the first post presenting my teacher’s notes of past UKMT papers, starting with JMC 2015.

The objective of these teacher’s notes is not to provide solutions — UKMT already provides an excellent Pdf of solutions and further investigations, which you can download here — but to provide insights to teachers as to how UKMT questions can be used in the classroom.

In other words, these teacher’s notes are about making the best of the educational value of UKMT questions. Which, by the way, extends the scope of UKMT questions beyond their target age group. For example, some JMC questions, although intended for Year 7-8 students, can be used for educational purposes up to GCSE, sometimes even with A level students with the addition of relevant extensions and investigations.

In order to help teachers, I have indexed each UKMT question by Maths skills and problem-solving skills.

With the Maths skills index (which will ultimately be laid out in an Excel file when more of these teacher’s notes have been published), a teacher can access all questions related to a particular topic (fractions, for example, or simultaneous equations, etc.).

With the problem-solving skills index, it is possible to select questions according to which specific key drivers you want students to learn in order to solve problems more efficiently, such as:

• Complete the grid
• Deduction
• Easy way out
• Economy
• Elimination
• Alternative strategies
• Name / Label
• Systematic list
• Tree
• Bar modelling

(NB: these problem-solving skills will be fully explained in my next post: Introducing some problem-solving skills)

The JMC 2015 paper can be downloaded here. We all have favourite questions. For me, the prize for JMC 2015 is Question 24, a highly educational problem on palindromic numbers.

Here is a recap table of JMC 2015 questions indexed by Maths skills and problem-solving skills, please click here to download the full PDF UKMT JMC 2015 (teacher’s notes).

JMC 2015 Teacher’s notes – Recap table