Caribou Mathematics Competition Preparation: Online Contests Through the Year

A contest built for the screen

The Caribou Mathematics Competition is unusual in two respects, and both change how a student should prepare for it.

First, it runs as a series of contests through the school year rather than as one sitting. That removes much of the pressure from any single round and makes genuine improvement visible: a student can take a round, review it, and do better in the next one a few weeks later.

Second, it is delivered online and uses that properly. Questions can be interactive in ways a paper contest cannot manage - selecting, dragging, constructing an answer rather than ticking a letter. This is engaging, and it is also something to practise, because meeting an unfamiliar interface during a timed contest costs time that has nothing to do with the mathematics.

Games as mathematics

Caribou is known for problems about two-player games: who wins with perfect play, and why. These look like puzzles and are serious mathematics.

The reasoning behind them - identifying winning and losing positions and working backwards from the end of the game - is genuine combinatorial argument, and it transfers directly to the olympiad problems a student will meet later. Students usually enjoy these problems more than any other part of the contest, which makes them a useful entry point into a kind of thinking that can otherwise feel abstract.

Logic, systematically

A substantial part of the contest is logical deduction: puzzles where several statements constrain a situation and the answer follows from eliminating what cannot be true.

Students tend to attack these by guessing and checking. That works on easy ones and fails on hard ones. We teach systematic elimination - tracking what each statement rules out, in writing - which turns a problem that felt like luck into one that is simply worked through.

Seeing rather than calculating

The spatial and visual problems are often easier to see than to compute. Nets, paths through a grid, tilings and symmetry questions frequently resolve the moment the student draws the right picture, and resist any amount of algebra before that.

This is a trainable skill. Drawing the figure, drawing it large, and drawing a second one when the first turns out to be misleading are habits rather than talents.

Using a series properly

Because there are several contests across the year, the right approach is iterative. Sit a round, review every problem including the ones answered correctly by luck, and go into the next round having closed those gaps.

We structure the course around that rhythm rather than building to a single peak. A student who improves across four rounds has learned considerably more than one who performs well once.

How the classes run

Sessions are live and online, one-on-one or in small groups of two to six. Practice includes the on-screen formats as well as the mathematics, because comfort with the interface is worth marks on the day.

Who this suits

Students who enjoy puzzles and are comfortable with arithmetic and simple logic. It is a particularly good first competition for a student who finds a single high-stakes paper intimidating, since the series format makes any one round matter less.

Levels, dates and registration are set by the organisers; check cariboutests.com for the current year.

A low-pressure way in

For many students the barrier to competition mathematics is not the difficulty but the stakes. A single annual paper that decides everything is an uncomfortable introduction for a child who is not yet confident.

Caribou removes most of that. A disappointing round is followed by another one a few weeks later, and the format rewards steady improvement rather than peaking on a particular morning. We regularly use it as a first competition for students who would find AMC 8 intimidating, and they usually arrive at AMC 8 a year later considerably more composed.