Twenty-five questions. Sixty minutes. No calculator. One clock that does not pause. It is the same shape as the morning your child will sit at school, and the point of doing it at home is not the mark at the end — it is that an hour feels different from twenty minutes of dipping in and out. Here is exactly what happens, screen by screen, so nothing on the day is a surprise.

Choosing the paper

Inside the Maths Challenge room, under A full paper, is a grid of year tiles — twelve for the Junior Maths Challenge, twelve for the Intermediate, covering 2015 to 2026.

The tiles carry their own state. A paper your child has not sat reads 60 min. One they have sat shows a tick and the mark they got. So the grid doubles as a record of what has been done, without anyone having to keep a list.

The clock

Sixty minutes, running. It does not pause, and that is deliberate: an hour of maths with no exit is a different skill from an hour of maths with a kitchen in it. Sit your child somewhere quiet, and leave them to it.

At the five-minute mark the room says so:

Five minutes left.

That single announcement does most of the work of exam technique. It is the moment a child decides whether to keep grinding at question 22 or go back and put something in the three they skipped.

Autosave, so an interruption costs nothing

Everything your child selects is saved the moment they select it. The product says it in as many words, and repeats it at the end:

Everything you chose was saved as you went.

If the tablet dies, if someone needs the room, if a younger sibling arrives — the run is still there. Back in the room, a resume band appears at the top offering it back. If there is both a timed and an untimed run open, the timed one outranks the untimed one, because the clock-run is the one with something at stake.

Working the paper out of order

The controls along the bottom are the ones a good candidate actually uses:

Control What it does
⚑ Flag Mark a question to come back to
← Prev Step back
Skip → Move on without answering
All questions A grid of all twenty-five, each cell reading answered, flagged or blank
Submit Finish early

The All questions grid is the one worth showing your child before their first run. Being able to see, at a glance, that four are blank and two are flagged is what turns "I'm running out of time" into a decision rather than a panic.

And note the third state in that grid: blank. Leaving a question blank is a real, supported choice here, not an oversight the interface nags about. Whether it is the right choice depends on which paper is open, not which competition — every Intermediate year penalises a wrong answer on the back ten questions, and so do the Junior papers from 2015 to 2019. Only Junior papers from 2020 onwards carry no penalty. Blank, wrong, or a guess works through when each one pays.

When the hour runs out

The paper closes itself, with no drama:

Time. Everything you chose was saved as you went. It's marked as it stands.

Then a single button: See the marks.

There is no scolding about unfinished questions. Almost nobody finishes a Maths Challenge paper comfortably; the papers are built so the last few are hard on purpose.

The marked screen

Your child sees their mark — "{marks} out of {max}" — and then one onward door:

Take the wrong ones to the clinic

That is the whole design in one line. The mark is a number; the wrong answers are the material. Each one has already been filed under a named mistake in Things to fix, where it can be worked with a re-trap or taken to Professor Pi.

What your child will not see is a predicted certificate. Twenty-three of the twenty-four loaded papers carry no published grade boundaries, and where boundaries are absent the mark bar draws no tick row at all — not a greyed one, not an approximated one. No readiness score, no percentile, no chance of passing. Why we don't tell you it was a Gold sets out why that is a feature.

What you can do as a parent

  1. Book the hour, once. A full paper needs a real hour. If that is hard to find, a twelve-minute sprint is the honest substitute on a school night.
  2. Show them the All questions grid first. Two minutes of orientation before the clock starts saves ten minutes of confusion during it.
  3. Take the mark quietly. Then go to the clinic together. The mistakes are where the next fortnight's practice comes from.
  4. Set the competition as an exam. Doing so brings the Maths cards round sooner so the last one lands before the day — see set the Challenge as an exam.

For the competition itself — format, how entry works through school, what the follow-on rounds are — start with the UK Junior Maths Challenge.

FAQ

What happens if my child has to stop halfway through?

Everything they chose was saved as they went, and the run stays open — the room shows a resume band at the top when a run is unfinished. A timed run outranks an untimed one for that band, so the clock-run is the thing offered back first.

What happens when the hour runs out?

The paper closes on its own with the line "Time. Everything you chose was saved as you went. It's marked as it stands." and a button reading "See the marks". Nothing is lost and nothing is penalised for being unfinished.

Should my child guess at the end, or leave questions blank?

That depends on the paper, not the competition, and it is worth knowing before the day. A blank always scores 0, on every paper. A wrong answer does not: every Intermediate year penalises the back ten questions by 1 or 2 marks, and so do the older Junior papers, 2015 to 2019. Only the Junior papers from 2020 onwards carry no penalty at all. Leaving a question blank is a real, supported choice in the room.

Duke Harewood built aitutors.me for his own KS3-aged daughter. The five-minute call exists because she used to spend the last ten minutes of every practice paper on one question she was never going to get. Updated 10 September 2026.