COMPETITIONS

About the YMSA Competition

The Young Mathematical Story Authors (YMSA) competition is the world's first annual international competition set up to encourage young mathematics learners (4-16 years old) from around the world to creatively embed their mathematics learning in a meaningful and engaging context through creating their own mathematical story picture books.

This competition is organised by MathsThroughStories.org, and it has been running every year since 2019. Since then, the competition has received entries from around 4,000 students across over 260 schools in 23 countries.

The competition's social media hashtag is #YMSAMaths.

Judging Panel

In addition to Dr. Natthapoj Vincent Trakulphadetkrai (Founder of MathsThroughStories.org and Associate Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Reading, UK), our judging panel also includes three prolific mathematical story authors, Kersti Worlsey, Stuart J. Murphy and Cindy Neuschwander.

To acknowledge their contribution to the field of mathematical storytelling, the Awards for our three age categories (4-7, 8-11, 12-16 years old) are named as The Kersti Worsley Award, The Stuart J. Murphy Award and The Cindy Neuschwander Award respectively.

Kersti Worsley (Oxford, UK). Kersti is a Senior Publisher in the Primary team at Oxford University Press, where she has been for over 17 years. As part of her role there, she has helped develop a new mathematical story picture books, called the Stories for Maths series for children aged 4–7 years old, which encourages maths learning through the ‘safe space’ of a story. Of the 49 titles in this series, Kersti has written 9 books. Kersti has a first-class undergraduate degree and an MA in Writing, and has written many books in the course of her work. She has a keen interest in vocabulary, oracy, and learning design.

Stuart J. Murphy (Massachusetts, USA). With 63 mathematical stories under his name and a total volume of 18+ million copies of his MathStart series sold worldwide, Stuart is the world's most prolific and best-selling mathematical story author. Stuart is also the author of I See I Learn, a series of 16 books that teach social, emotional, health and safety, and cognitive skills to young children. In addition, he is also a member of the authorship teams of a number of mathematics programs published by Savvas Learning (formerly Pearson Education), including enVisionMATH, a top-selling comprehensive elementary mathematics program.

Cindy Neuschwander (California, USA). Cindy has authored all 13 titles in the very well-established and much-loved Sir Cumference series. She is also the author of three other titles in a separate series following mathematical adventures of Matt and Bibi ('Mummy Math: An Adventure in Geometry', 'Pastry School in Paris: An Adventure in Capacity' and 'Patterns in Peru: An Adventure in Patterning'). Additionally, Cindy also contributed to other mathematical series, namely ‘Amanda Bean's Amazing Dream’ (Marilyn Burns Brainy Day Books series) as well as '88 Pounds of Tomatoes' and 'The Chocolate Champs' (Hello Math Readers series).

Judging Criteria

4-7 years old

Ability to come up with an engaging and original story (with a beginning, middle and end)
Ability to show how a mathematical concept in the story is used to solve a problem
Ability to use a combination of words, numbers and drawings to show the mathematical concept in the story
Ability to present your story clearly and the mathematics accurately (e.g., quality of drawings, neatness of presentation, mathematical correctness, etc.)

8-11 & 12-16 years old

Ability to come up with an engaging and original story (with a beginning, middle and end)
Ability to embed the chosen mathematical concept in a meaningful context
Ability to show how characters' knowledge of the chosen mathematical concept can help them solve a problem
Ability to use a combination of words, mathematical symbols/notations and drawings to show the mathematical concept in the story
Ability to explain the chosen mathematical concept in the story clearly without assuming readers' knowledge of the concept
Ability to present your story clearly and the mathematics accurately (e.g., quality of drawings, neatness of presentation, mathematical correctness, etc.)

Key Dates

Entries open - Monday 6th January 2025

Closing date for entries - Friday 21st March 2025 (17:00 UK time)

Results publicly announced - Friday 30th May 2025

Awards

The winner in each of our three entry categories will receive an award of £100, and their school will also receive £100. (In case of homeschooled children, if they won, they would get £100 and their nominated local public library would too get £100.)
The winners will also have their own profile, their schools and their winning entries featured on the MathsThroughStories.org website. (Since its launch in March 2017, the website has been visited around 2 million times by over half a million teachers and parents from over 220 countries around the world.)

Sponsors
Our YMSA competition is generously sponsored by the following publishers.

Oxford University Press is the publisher of the new Stories for Maths series.

HarperCollins is the publisher of MathStart, the world’s largest mathematical stories series authored by a single author (Stuart J. Murphy).

Charlesbridge is the publisher of Cindy Neuschwander’s Sir Cumference series. (It also publishes the Math Adventures series and the Storytelling Math series.)

The YMSA Competition Poster
To help promote this competition to students at your school, we have created a poster PDF for you to e-mail to your students and their parents and have the poster displayed around your school.

The 2025 YMSA poster PDF can be downloaded here.

Supporting Resources for Students
In collaboration with our judges, we are pleased to share the following supporting resources:

our mathematical story writing guideline;
our mathematical storytelling mind map and storyboard for 4-7 years old and 8-16 years old, and
our suggested mathematical story picture book template for 4-7 years old and 8-16 years old.

Concerning the template, the story structure found in the template is only one of many possible story structures. Stories that do not follow this suggested story structure will still be considered. Please use this template to help your students/child with their story planning. The final version of their story should then be neatly transferred onto clean / blank A4 sheets of paper.

Example Entries
Other ways that you can support your students/child is to encourage them to read as many as possible past successful YMSA entries which are accessible via the links below. (Please note that 2025 is our first year to receive entries from 4-7 years old children so there are not any previous example entries to share with this age group yet.)

Winning and shortlisted entries from 2024 can be found here.
Winning and shortlisted entries from 2023 can be found here.
Winning and shortlisted entries from 2022 can be found here.
Winning and shortlisted entries from 2021 can be found here.
Winning and shortlisted entries from 2020 can be found here.
Winning and shortlisted entries from 2019 can be found here.

Presentation Guideline

Entries for the 4-7 years old category must not exceed four A4 pages (excluding front and back covers);
Entries for the 8-11 and 12-16 years old categories must not exceed eight A4 pages (excluding front and back covers) - consider using our suggested mathematical story picture book template (see the above section);
Where possible, students' own drawings or illustrations are strongly encouraged to avoid any copyrights issues;
Each entry (or story) should clearly focus on one mathematical topic to show depth of knowledge on that topic;
Please note that your chosen mathematical concept must be what you are currently learning. For example, if you are aged 12-16 years old, your chosen mathematical concept should be about algebraic functions, exponential growth, powers and roots, more advanced probability and statistics, etc., and not about addition, multiplication, simple fractions or basic properties of 2D shapes, for instance. (For students aged 12-16 years old, please also note that we have received many entries with the focus on Pythagoras' Theorem, trigonometry and bearings in each year: you are therefore strongly encouraged to choose a different mathematical concept to make your entries stand out more.)
The entry (or story) can be written in any sub-genre of fiction (e.g. fantasy, detective, thrillers, action, mystery/adventure, ghost story, humour, science fiction, fairy/magical tale, myths or legends, etc.);
The front cover must contain: 1) the story's title; 2) the names of the author and their school. (If homeschooled, please indicate so);
All pages should be numbered (excluding front and back covers);
Entries should be submitted in the 'portrait' / vertical format (as opposed to the 'landscape' / horizontal format).

Submission Guideline

Entries must genuinely represent the work of the students (and not of their teachers or parents);
Each student can only submit one entry, but there is no limit to the number of entries per school;
Only 'individual' entries are currently possible (i.e. one student/author per story). 'Team' entry is not possible at this stage;
Entries can be submitted by students from anywhere in the world, but the entries must be submitted in standard English;
All entries must be submitted electronically as a PDF file. (Tip: Anything written or drawn by regular pencils, once scanned, will be very hard to read and see. On the final draft, consider writing over your text and outlining your drawings with a felt-tip pen);
In your submission e-mail, feel free to indicate if students have any cognitive/learning disabilities that you would like the judges to take into account.
Inclusiveness: Please do not feel like you have to initially select and send us only the strongest few entries from your school. In fact, we would encourage you to forward to us all the entries from all your students to ensure that all students feel equally included as part of the competition. (It is very common for us to receive 50-300 entries from each school, for example.)
All entries must be submitted by the student's teacher. (For homeschooled children, the entries can be submitted by their parent);
The file name of all entries must be saved in the following format: School's name_Country_Author's first nameAuthor's last name_Author's age_Author's gender (e.g., LondonPrimarySchool_UK_DavidSmith_9_Male). For homeschooled students, simply replace the school's name with 'Homeschooling' in the file name. Concerning the author's gender, the author can choose 'Male', 'Female', 'Non-binary' or 'Undisclosed' in the file name.
All entries must be submitted to [email protected] by the stated deadline. (If your school is submitting several entries [e.g., 20+ entries], please feel free to upload the files onto either Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive, and simply send us the URL link to access / download the files ourselves.)

Terms and Conditions

Our judges' decisions are final;
Due to the expected volume of submitted entries, we are unable to provide feedback for unsuccessful entries;
Unsuccessful entries, with further improvements, can be submitted again in the following year's competition;
By submitting your student's / child's entry, you guarantee that the work is of their own creation and no part of the work has been plagiarised from the work of others or includes the creative involvement of others;
By submitting your student's / child's entry, MathsThroughStories.org is permitted to use the submitted entry for our research, and to help promote our future competitions as well as the works of our organisation in general.

For more information of this competition, please contact us here.

Outreach Partners

We are grateful to the following Outreach Partners for promoting our competition to Mathematics teachers and students in their respective regions around the world.

Europe