Pi-Oneers Math Contest Prep

Ace your next Math competition! Strengthen your math skills, discover contest tips and tricks, learn about combinatorics, probability, geometry and deducting reasoning. In this camp you will learn math in a fun way while, at the same time, mastering test writing strategies.

We will focus on contest questions that appear in the AMC (8 and 10) and University of Waterloo CEMC Contests (Gauss, Pascal, Cayley).

When and Where?

Monday July 14 - Friday July 18, 2025.

1:00 - 4:00pm.

Location: The Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology (VISST): 1490 West Broadway, Vancouver.

Who?

This camp is for students going into grades 6-9.

Why should you attend?

• Earn a certificate of completion from the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology.
• Strengthen your deductive reasoning muscles and improve focus and concentration skills.
• Experience a fresh, engaging, and challenging approach to math and learn with like-minded students.
• Improve your test writing strategies to not only do better in Math competitions but also in school.

What will you learn?

Day One: Combinatorics

We’ll start off the week with combinatorics problems.  Ever wonder how many ways you can arrange three of your friends in a line?  What about 12 of them?  And what if they are in a circle?  How many ways are there to go 6 blocks east and 4 blocks south?  By the end of Day 1 you will be able to do all these combinatorics problems and more with style and ease.

Day Two: Probability

On Day Two we will focus on another fun topic in math that can confuse many mathematicians if they are not careful: probability.  We will talk about the Monty Hall problem to show just how tricky (and fun) these problems can be and emphasize why it is necessary to present your thought process well so you can be sure you got the right answer.  We will go through a variety of probability type questions from the AMC and University of Waterloo Math Contests.

Day Three: Geometry

Sometimes knowing the right formula to use on a geometry question can save you 10 minutes or more in a math competition. On Day Three we will focus on covering a number of formulas used in geometry involving circles, triangles, quadrilaterals and intersecting lines.  Familiarity with these formulas and developing an intuitive sense of when to use them will really help to increase your efficiency and boost your scores in math competitions.

Day Four: Deductive Reasoning and Proofs

On multiple choice contests it is sometimes faster to eliminate answers that we know cannot be correct and then test out the remaining choices.  We will do some questions using this deductive reasoning approach.

Sometimes it's easier to solve a hard problem by turning it into a smaller problem and starting there.  If we have the tools to prove our simple solution works for the larger problem too, there is nothing left to do but to circle the correct answer with confidence.  We can do this using the “proof by induction” strategy, which we will go over.

We will also spend some time proving some formulas related to sequences, series and geometry so that you can understand these formulas, derive them again if you forget them and use them with confidence when you need to.

Day Five: Test Writing Strategy

On the last day of our camp we will cover some remaining difficult topics like statistics, thinking in three dimensions and working with connected graphs (networks).  As we tackle these tough questions we will focus on how to present our work so that we can get to the correct answer quickly and elegantly and explain our work to our peers if needed.