Maths Problem Of The Week

How to actually make use of Maths Problem Of The Week programs

You've probably noticed these popping up everywhere now. Primary schools, secondary schools, even some university outreach pages. They send out one problem each week, usually with a solution a few days later, and tell you to get your students or children to have a go. Sounds harmless enough. The reality of running these consistently is a bit messier than the brochure suggests. The basic mechanism is straightforward. A problem gets posted, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday, with a deadline to submit an answer by the following Monday. Students work through it, either individually or in groups, and submit their attempt. Some programs grade it automatically, others have humans mark it. The feedback cycle can take anywhere from a few hours to a full week depending on the platform. I run these through my school for KS3 and KS4 students, so I deal with the logistics more than the abstract idea of them. Here's what I actually found after doing this properly for over two years rather than just signing up and forgetting about it.

Getting started with Maths Problem Of The Week

Most reputable programs require you to register as an educator or student. The main UK providers are managed through established educational bodies, and you typically sign up through their website. There's usually a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier gives you access to the problems and solutions. The paid tier, if your school can afford it, adds things like class dashboards, automated marking, and printable worksheets. Before you sign anyone up, check the difficulty range. I found this out the hard way. Last October we ran a problem involving logarithmic inequalities with a constraint optimization twist that was clearly aimed at Further Mathematics A-level students. My Year 9 set stared at it for twenty minutes and then gave up entirely. It wasn't a bad problem, it was just in the wrong room. I switched to the archive and pulled problems tagged for their level instead, and engagement jumped from about thirty percent submission rate to seventy-five percent within two weeks. The key insight most people miss is that difficulty alignment matters more than consistency. Doing one problem a week from the wrong level is worse than skipping a week and hitting the right one. You build frustration, not competence.

The actual process most schools get wrong

People treat these as homework to be completed and collected. That's the wrong framing. The problems are designed to be struggled with productively, which means you need to build in time for that struggle during the school day or structured session, not just assign it and hope. A typical effective session looks like this: the problem goes up on Monday, students see it Wednesday morning, they spend twenty minutes on it in class on Wednesday trying it themselves or in pairs, then they have the weekend to keep going if they want. Thursday or Friday is when I go through the solution with the class, highlighting the part where most people got stuck. That retrospective discussion is where the actual learning happens. The trying is important, but the unpacking is where it clicks. I've also learned to stop expecting everyone to submit every week. In a class of thirty, you're lucky if twenty actually hand something in. The twenty who don't are usually the ones who need it most but are most demoralized by the process. I stopped tracking non-submission and just leave it as an open invitation. It's improved my relationship with the students who are on the edge of giving up on maths altogether.

Common pitfalls and what to do instead

The biggest trap is treating the problem as a test rather than a learning tool. When students think it's graded, they either cheat by looking up the answer immediately or they don't try at all. I make it explicitly clear that the attempt matters more than the answer. Some programs let you submit multiple attempts, and that's the feature to use. Getting it wrong, seeing the hint, trying again — that's the loop that works. Another thing nobody warns you about is the time zone and deadline issue. If your students are doing these at home over a weekend, a Monday deadline means different things depending on whether they're night owls or early birds. I changed our submission window to Tuesday evening and submission rates went up noticeably. People need an extra day sometimes. There's also the problem of solutions being published before everyone has had a fair go. If the solution drops on Friday and someone checks their phone over the weekend, they've seen the answer before they've finished thinking. Some platforms stagger the release. If yours doesn't, you can mitigate this by making the solution discussion a live classroom event rather than letting students look it up independently.

When these programs don't work

I need to be honest about the limitations. Maths Problem Of The Week style programs are not a substitute for core instruction. They're supplement material at best. If a student doesn't have the foundational skills to approach the problem, the program won't teach them those skills. It assumes a baseline of algebraic fluency, logical reasoning, and comfort with unfamiliar problems. Kids who are behind on curriculum basics will hit a wall and disengage. They also don't scale well in under-resourced settings. Without a teacher or parent to sit down and discuss the solution afterward, the value drops significantly. A problem with no feedback is just a puzzle, and puzzles aren't the same as mathematical learning. If your school doesn't have the staffing to facilitate the post-problem discussion, you're getting maybe half the benefit. For students who need additional support, I'd recommend pairing these with a targeted intervention program rather than expecting the weekly problem to cover all gaps. The problem reveals the gaps, yes, but it doesn't fix them. That requires direct instruction on the specific missing concepts.

A technical detail that saves headaches

If you're registering a whole class, take the time to set up the group properly in the platform. Barely anyone does this and then spends the rest of the term manually entering individual student names or dealing with mismatched accounts. The group setup takes about ten minutes and saves roughly two hours per term in administrative time. It's boring but it's real. The archive search function on most platforms is also underused. Rather than always using the most recent problem, I regularly pull problems from earlier in the year that target skills my current cohort is weak on. A problem from three months ago about simultaneous equations can be more useful than a brand new geometry problem when you're trying to build a specific skill. The archive is there for a reason. One more thing worth noting: the quality of problems varies between providers. Some are genuinely clever and well-crafted. Others feel like textbook exercises dressed up in slightly more interesting language. If your students seem bored rather than challenged, that's a signal to look at a different provider or switch to a program with a reputation for more rigorous problems. I've found that programs backed by university mathematics departments tend to produce harder, more interesting problems than commercial ed-tech companies, though the interface and UX are often worse as a trade-off.