Challenge 24 Contest | Saint Bonaventure University (2023)

Challenge 24 is a mathematics competition for students in grades 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, organized each spring by the SBU Mathematics Department. The participants play the24 game, consisting of a deck of cards, each showing four whole numbers between 1 and 9. When presented with a card, players strive to be the first to combine the four numbers to make 24 using only addition, subtractions, multiplications or divisions. Many cards have more than one solution. The game can be surprisingly challenging, but the contestants in Challenge 24 are pretty good, having previously won competitions within their own schools.

The Challenge 24 Contest Co-Cordinators are Ms. Angela Castle and Dr. Christine Uhl.

the game 24

The 24 Game was developed in 1988 by Robert Sun to provide students with a fun way to discover patterns among numbers. Sun founded the company Suntex International Inc. to market the game.

Each card in Game 24 is marked with a dot, two dots, or three dots to indicate its level of difficulty. In general, the higher the number of points, the more challenging the card.

On the right is a colon card containing the numbers 2, 3, 4, and 4. Try to make 24 with the numbers on this card. Remember: you must use each of the numbers 2, 3, 4 and 4 exactly once and the only operations you can use are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. (Since you must use each of the numbers 2, 3, 4, and 4 exactly once, you'll end up using 4 twice.) You don't need to use all four operations, and you can use an operation more than once. There are three essentially different solutions for this card. Can you find them all?

To SBU students: Help!

The Math Department needs about 30 volunteers to run the Challenge 24 Competition. If you'd like to work with kids who love math, sign up to help us! Elementary school students are especially encouraged to volunteer. The competition is held on a Saturday in March or early April. The next competition will be planned for the fall, at which time volunteers will be solicited by email and in math classes.

Competition Challenge 24 of 2023

On Saturday, March 18, the Desafío 24 2023 Competition was held. This year, forty-nine students from six schools participated. Participating schools were Allegany-Limestone Middle School, Hinsdale Central School, Olean Intermediate-Middle School, The Learning Center Bradford, East View Elementary (Olean), and Washington West Elementary (Olean).

Medals and $1,000 scholarships to St. Bonaventure University were awarded to first, second, and third place students in each grade. Congratulations to all!

Third degree

• First place: Jacob Dunmire (East View Olean)
• Runner-up: Anvitha Balineni (Washington West)
• Third place: Jacob Moses (Hinsdale Central School)

Fourth grade

• First place: Mya Goodling (Hinsdale Central School)
• Second Place: Aadhav Rajaramanathan (Olean Intermediate High School)
• Tercer lugar: Avery Vosler (Hinsdale Central School)

Fifth grade

• First Place: Elan Thach (Olean Middle School)
• Second Place: Owen Talbot (Olean Intermediate Middle School)
• Third Place: Grant Perry (Olean Intermediate Middle School)

Sixth grade

• First Place: Ella Moses (Hinsdale Central School)
• Second Place: Jenna Goodling (Hinsdale Central School)
• Third place: Jack Keim (Hinsdale Central School)

Seventh grade

• First Place: Sushanth Kondur (Allegany-Limestone High School)
• Second Place: Brian Bergstrom (Hinsdale Central School)
• Third Place: Zynah Rafi (Olean Middle School)

Inside a Challenge 24 competition

On a cold Saturday morning in March, elementary and middle school students may be watching TV, texting their friends, or playing outside in the remnants of winter. You may be mostly right, but not entirely. In Western New York, some 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th grade students have traveled with their parents and teachers to St. Bonaventure University to compete in a competition for math. That's quite a beautiful thing.

The Challenge 24 contest is organized by Ms. Angela Colomaio, Dr. Christine Uhl and about five Bona students. The organizers enlist the help of about 30 volunteers, ranging from SBU students to SBU faculty, middle school teachers, and parents. The organizers and volunteers are here for a reason: to celebrate the wonderfully talented elementary and middle school students who love math so much that they spend a Saturday morning in a math competition. Challenge 24 also celebrates the teachers and parents who have trained and supported their students and children.

Ronda individual:During the Individual Round, students compete against the mallet and the clock. As this round progresses, the room fills with the hum of arithmetic operations. Supervisors are in awe of the math skills demonstrated by the 24 Challenge participants.

The Single Round requires a large number of supervisors; some parents and teachers pitch in to help the round run more efficiently. Thank you!

Group round:During the group round, students from each grade level compete against each other in groups of four.

Group finals:Challenge 24 culminates in the Group Finals, in which the top six students from each grade level compete against each other. Instead of solving a single card, students now must provide a missing number to solve two cards simultaneously.

Award ceremony:Medals, in the traditional colors of gold, silver, and bronze, and $1,000 scholarships to St. Bonaventure University are awarded to first-, second-, and third-place students at each grade level. Photos of the winners are then published in the Olean Times Herald.

Fantastic Facts About the Game Magic Number 24

• The most challenging challenge 24There are many sets of four numbers between 1 and 9 that cannot be "solved" according to the rules of Game 24. The set {1, 1, 1, 1} cannot be solved, for example, because the numbers are too small to get to 24 using the four arithmetic operations. Of course, the 24 Game cards only show solvable sets of four numbers. However, there are some solvable sets of numbers that do not appear on any 24 Game cards. The two most challenging solvable sets for Game 24 are {3, 3, 7, 7} and {3, 3, 8, 8}. Can you make 24 of these sets by following the rules of Game 24?

• divide and conquer24 has eight positive divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24. That's a lot of divisors for a small number. This may be why Robert Sun chose 24 as the "target" number for his game. The more divisors a number has, the easier it is to make the number from a product of two numbers. There are four products that add up to 24: 1x24, 2x12, 3x8, and 4x6. The lowest integer that has more divisors than 24 is 36.

• Just the factorials, ma'am24 es 4factorial, written 4!. The factorial of a positive integernorteis the product of the integers from 1 tonorte. Therefore 4! = 1x2x3x4 = 24. Factorials are fantastically useful in counting theory. For example, suppose you have four 24 Game cards. The number of ways you can arrange the cards from first to fourth is 4! = 24.

  (Video) Everyone SWAPPED rooms for 4 days!! Who will win a TV in their room?!

• funniest factorials24 factorial, written 24!, is equal to 620448401733239439360000, which has precisely 24 digits. The only other positive integersnortefor whichnorte! has exactlynorteThe digits are 1, 22 and 23.

• One day at a timeThere are 24 hours in a day, a fact that made "24" the title of a popular television series. The 24-hour day seems to have originated with the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians liked to count in base 12, perhaps because the human hand has 12 finger joints. (A hand has four fingers and a thumb; each finger has three joints.) With one hand, you can use your thumb to count to 12 at the finger joints. (Try it and see). Base 12 seems pretty weird to us, but is it really weirder to use a base 12 number system because one hand has 12 finger joints than it is to use a base 10 system because two hands have 10 fingers (well, eight fingers and two thumbs)? Given their affection for base 12, it was natural for the Egyptians to divide the day into 12 parts and the night into 12 parts, leading to the modern 24-hour day.

• worth a shotThe NBA uses a 24-second shot clock to time offensive team possessions. The shot clock was invented by Danny Biasone, the late owner of the Syracuse Nationals, in the 1950s to try to speed up the game and keep teams from stagnating. Why 24 seconds? Biasone calculated that the average number of shots two teams would take during a game was 120. He divided that number into the length of a game, which is 48 minutes or 2880 seconds. The result is 2880/120 = 24 seconds.

• far side of the moonTo date, exactly 24 human beings have traveled to the Moon. "Traveled to" means "reached lunar orbit or landed on the Moon." Of these 24, 12 walked on the Moon. Until now, all manned missions to the Moon occurred between 1968 and 1972.

• license to deriveYou can play Game 24 using New York license plates! The license plates of most New York cars have the format LLL-DDDD, where L is a letter and D is a digit between 0 and 9. All four digits can, in principle, be used for Game 24. However, unlike 24 Game cards, some license plates have one or more zeros and it is not always possible to make 24 with the digits of a license plate. However, the game can be played successfully with the license plates of many, perhaps most, New York cars. Speaking of cars...

• a good signThe closest Interstate 86 exit to St. Bonaventure University is Exit 24.