Important dates
Contest date: Monday, June 2, 2025, or later
Ordering deadline: Thursday, May 29, 2025
Contest overview
The Team Up Challenge is a set of materials containing four events that educators can use with their students. Participants work in teams and engage in fun and interactive activities to strengthen their mathematical problem-solving skills. This free resource is designed to encourage student participation while giving educators the flexibility to decide when and how to conduct the challenge, including team size and other logistical aspects.
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Contest details
Students in Grades 6, 7, or 8, grouped into teams of four.
Contest dates: Monday, June 2, 2025, or later
Contest timing: Educators may run this contest any time on or after June 2, 2025. The contest is best conducted in the classroom.
Ordering deadline: Thursday, May 29, 2025
The Team Up Challenge consists of four events:
- Team Paper: Team members collaborate to solve 15 math questions of increasing difficulty.
- Crossnumber Puzzle: Like a crossword puzzle, however the answers are all numbers instead of words. Some clues make it possible to find a number directly, while others rely on answers from other clues.
- Logic Puzzle: A description of a situation and a list of clues that students put together to solve a puzzle.
- Relay: Like a relay in track and field, where a baton is passed from player to player to finish the race, in this math relay a number is passed from student to student to get the final answer.
The Team Up Challenge can be organized within a single class, or for several classes within a school, or as a larger event for multiple schools.
The Team Up Challenge is designed so that the content will be no higher than what should be normally covered by the end of Grade 6 while still challenging students in Grades 7 and 8. For this reason, the contest is run in the month of June, towards the end of the Canadian school year. This inclusive design makes the challenge an excellent opportunity for educators to get all students involved.
Past Contests: Participants can review and attempt past contests to gain a better understanding of the contest format, level of difficulty and time management. The CEMC has published contests and their solutions from previous years in the Past Contests section of Tools and Resources.
Educators run each of the four parts of the Team Up Challenge in-person. They will have access to contest instructions and contest materials on Monday, June 2, 2025, at 9:00 a.m. EDT in the Contest Material Repository of the Contest Supervisor Portal and can conduct the contest any time after that. These materials will be publicly available on our website in mid-August. The 2025 Team Up Challenge question papers will be available in both French and English. Please note that the solutions are only available in English.
Educators mark this contest in school and do not submit results to the CEMC for marking.
This contest is available free of charge.
Contest results
The focus of the Team Up Challenge is participation and collaboration. For this reason, educators are given solutions so that they can check each team's work. The CEMC does not collect results.