Newcastle Permanent Orange branch lending manager Erin McVicar said she wanted local schools like Mullion Creek to show the rest of the state what they could do while having fun with maths.

“I’m so proud to be a part of the Orange community and I believe that we have exceptional primary mathematicians in our region, so I’m urging all our local primary schools - private and public - to get on board with the Newcastle Permanent Primary School Mathematics Competition,” Ms McVicar said.

Mullion Creek Public School principal Sally Beer said that unlike the maths tests of earlier days, modern maths tests allowed a variety of ways to approach problems.

“The maths competition isn’t just a load of equations that need an answer, they’re problems that we face everyday such as going shopping and adding and subtracting and using whatever skill set and strategy that works best for them to get a result,” she said.

Thirteen of the students have signed up to the competition and have been developing their skills and applying them to the tasks that Mrs Beer, as their teacher, has been dishing out to them.

“We built a tower and we calculated the measurements needed, and then we worked out how much weight it could carry,” Mrs O’Brien said. 

No longer can students ask, ‘When would I ever use this?’ when it comes to learning maths.

“It’s all about problem solving in situations that we come across all the time, such as finding the area of something, rather than just sums,” she said.