British International School, Phuket (BISP) successfully hosted the FOBISIA Mathematics Code Breaking competition for the second year running. The virtual event was a huge success again with 78 schools taking part from across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Students had to work through a variety of codes, and those who cracked all codes at each level had the opportunity to have their names on the leaderboard.  There were over 17,000 leaderboard entries from 14,000 competitors – a fantastic achievement!

There is a close link between mathematics and code breaking which made this a natural fit as a mathematics competition. The skills that make good mathematicians, problem-solving, logical thought and perseverance are the same skills that make great code breakers. 

Students from both Primary and Secondary took part across the week. BISP Primary students in Year 5 and Year 6 were some of the first students in the world to try out the codes and gave some invaluable feedback to support running the event.  The first students to complete from each class were Elizaveta, Dylan, Tara, Jade,  and Na-Phatsara.

In Secondary, all of our Year 7s, Year 8s and Year 9s took part together – and it was great to see such energy and enthusiasm from our students as they worked through the codes.  Our top code breakers in Year 7 were: Karin, Natkrita, Nikolai and Anna-Irina. In Year 8 it was Lehu, Aiden, Kiran, Clayton, Valeriya and Elina and in Year 9,  Pratik, Caleb, Ethan and Ilya were our code champions.  A special mention to Clayton and Valeriya who managed to complete 4 different code levels.

The British International School Phuket has done it again –  successfully hosting the first FOBISIA student event of the year, FOBISIA Online Maths Code Breaking. After last year’s amazing turnout, this year was even bigger with nearly 75 percent of FOBISIA member schools taking part. Along with 8 non-member schools, the hosts saw a staggering 14,000 children participate.  Congratulations to BISP for this exciting event, we hope the students and teachers enjoyed the codebreaking!

John Gwyn Jones MBE, CEO FOBISIA

Altogether BISP had over 370 students managing to get on the Level 1 leaderboard – which was great to see and placed our school in the Top 10 of schools globally for this challenge. Who knows, maybe some of these students will go on to work in encryption and decryption as a future career path? Well done to all of the students who took part in what has become one of the largest school maths challenges in the world.