On 26 October 2024, the second Hanoi Youth Math Conference (HYMC) was held in UNIS Hanoi. HYMC is a fun middle school math competition for passionate and dedicated mathematicians. 4 high school students (Minh Le, Koki Okoshi, Duc Do, Beomjoon Park) who are passionate about math organized this event by creating the math questions, booking the rooms, gathering equipment, and attending weekly meetings.

Last year, the event was specifically only for UNIS middle school students. However, this time HYMC breaks new ground and expands by inviting Concordia International School of Hanoi and British Vietnamese International School of Hanoi to come participate in the event. A total of 30 middle school students (almost double the last conference!) came to school on a Saturday to solve math problems and explore their passion.

The event was organized into 4 rounds. Three of them were team rounds where 5 students were collaborating to come up with creative solutions to challenging math problems. The other round was a highly engaging 1 hour individual exam where students were able to express their own strengths.

A lot of students enjoyed round 2: the treasure hunt round. 6 different teams of 5 ran around B5 and B6 looking for clues to find the final location. The students had to solve math problems and the answers would take them to specific lockers. The students were ecstatic about the active aspect of this round and even though the questions were highly challenging, most of the teams were able to arrive at the final location on time.

Another round we had was the ping pong challenge. Teams had one ping pong ball and they had to take turns attempting to put it into a paper cup. The number of times they can get the ball into the cup determined the difficulty of the question they received. As this process repeated, the students got better and better at bouncing the ball into the cup.

Thank you to Mr. Taggart, Mr. Jarman, Mr. Riehm, Ms. Aggarwal, Mr. Smith, Ms. Gubbels, Mr. Fleming, Mr. Phi, the Design Team, and Operations who helped with this event by providing feedback, support, equipments, access to rooms, and the arrangement of the rooms for the conference. Thank you so much to the external school supervisors: Mr. Vivek Jadav (BVIS), Mr. Henry Willets (BVIS), Mr. Seth Carper (CISH) for accepting our invitation to the conference and ensuring that your students were able to come safely and have fun during the conference. Thank you to Junyoung Cho and Seungmin Jung for coming to the conference to help the organising committee out. Thank you to all the participants including external students for joining this event and arriving with a 100% attendance rate on time for the opening ceremony.

Congratulations to BVIS 1 (Cong Khai Ky Tran, Minh Phuong Le, Quang Huy (Tommy) Le, Ngoc Bao Anh Nguyen, Quang Dung Pham) for 1st place in the team rounds. Congratulations to the individual winners: 1st place: Duc Minh Hoang (UNIS), 2nd place: Pham Quang Dung (BVIS), 3rd place: Minseo Lee (UNIS).