She’s nine years old and she’s brilliant. Danielle Boadu, a pupil at Peterborough Primary School in the UK, stood out from the crowd in a maths competition. With her creativity and love of maths, she wowed the judges and took home the top prize in the competition.
Danielle Boadu wins UK national maths competition
To celebrate World Maths Day, renowned educational technology company Renaissance Learning held a national maths competition, which was won by Danielle Boadu, then aged 9, as reported by the Peterborough Telegraph on 14 July 2022.
The competition challenged over 450 primary school pupils to express their creativity through a visual representation of mathematics. The children were asked to think broadly about how arithmetic could be illustrated in everyday life and create original artworks expressing their ideas. Their creations were then judged by experts including Murderous Maths author Kjartan Poskitt and Primary School Teacher of the Year Catherine Magee. And Boadu, a student at Heritage Park School in Peterborough, wowed the judges and won first prize!
“Danielle used mathematics to represent nature through the use of addition, shapes and parallel lines. She really surprised us with her creative and inspiring concepts,” said judge Catherine.
For this little girl, completing the challenge was child’s play. She says she treated the challenge as fun and had a great time. Her creativity and mathematical proficiency impressed the judges and earned her the honour of winning the competition, a certificate, a Kindle Fire and an annual subscription to the Freckle and Star Maths e-learning site for her primary school, Heritage Park, in Peterborough.
“I had a lot of fun doing my project. I found lots of shapes and patterns in the playground and drew objects to bring my idea to life. When I first looked around, everything in the playground looked normal, then I looked closer and remembered all the maths we had learned and thought, ‘wow, I have better vision now,’” said the winner.
“I am so happy for Danielle. She made fantastic mathematical observations and presented her findings carefully. “We looked at our school environment and it was fascinating for the children to see maths in nature,” added Danielle’s teacher, Nina Edenbrow.