THE Island's One World Centre set an Africa sized challenge to members of the public who attended the Tynwald celebrations on Tuesday.

The How Big is Africa? challenge saw 55 people given an outline map of Africa and told that it had the same area as the following countries combined - Belgium, China, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Greece, India, the Isle of Man, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

Participants were asked to sketch these countries into the map of Africa to show their relative size – ultimately showing that Africa was big enough to accommodate all of them.

Rosemary Clarke, the director of the One World Centre, said: "I have been working in global education for many years but my own attempt was far from accurate. I was delighted with the way that so many youngsters put a lot of thought into their submissions. And many of them were impressively close to the solution – this made the judging almost as hard as taking part."

In the end Robert Kelly was declared the under 18 winner and Rob Fletcher the over 18 winner. They each won a Co-operative voucher.