How do I register my school for the competition?

What is Puzzle of the Week and how do I run it at my school?

Puzzle of the Week is a free international puzzle competition for schools. Students submit answers to a puzzle which is published weekly on Mondays. All the previous puzzles and solutions are available in the Puzzle Library to use for free at any time. Once you have registered your school your students can register for the competition and submit answers. The solutions are published after the close of each competition and teachers can see how well their students are doing each week using their live feedback document.

Once you have registered you will receive more information about the competition and support in running it. You may also find the resources for teachers page and advice for teachers page useful.

Where did Puzzle of the Week come from and who runs it?

Puzzle of the Week was created by Andrew Sharpe, a UK based former maths teacher. He started running the competition voluntarily in 2016, designing the system, website and writing many of the puzzles.

A small team of volunteers now help keep the site running. Since 2019 Jennifer Dickson, a maths teacher in Scotland, has taken over much of the administration and work on the site. In 2020 Vicky Bould, an adult education specialist, took over the running of the social media platforms. Puzzles have been contributed by many different authors but Stephen Cross in England and Karin Romero in the USA deserve mention for their work.

The inspiration for the competition came whilst Andrew was working at Ilkley Grammar School in England. The school ran a weekly puzzle competition where the puzzles were printed and displayed in maths classrooms every week. Andrew took this idea to Garden International School in Malaysia and implemented a system for electronic answer submission. After sharing the idea on twitter other schools asked to join. The site and competition was then launched at the KL Junior Maths Competition at Nexus International School in early 2016 with 7 Malaysian schools involved. Since then the site and competition has grown to where it is now, with over 100,000 answers submitted.

The site is still run completely for free and makes a significant loss, if you would like to see how you could help then please visit our donate page.