9-Year Old Black Girl Wins Major UK Math Competition, Beats 450 Students

Nationwide — Danielle Boadu, a 9-year-old girl from the United Kingdom, has won this year’s “Sum It Up” national math competition, outdoing over 450 students in the category.

The competition launched by leading ed-tech provider Renaissance Learning brought together primary school children across the UK and Ireland to celebrate World Maths Day. It encouraged children to create imaginative artwork that shows their vision of how maths can be found and experienced in everyday life.

Boadu, a student at the Heritage Park Primary School in Peterborough, England, was selected by an expert panel of judges to win the competition. She used nature to represent techniques such as addition, shapes, and parallel lines with her unique visual interpretation of maths in her school playground.

“I had fun with my entry because I enjoyed finding all the shapes and patterns in the playground and drawing the objects that I counted and observed,” Boadu told Peterborough Today. “When I first looked all the things in the playground looked normal but then I looked closer and thought about all the things we had learnt in maths and I thought ‘wow, I can see all of the patterns.'”