Kiambu schools join mathematics Olympiad contest

Kiambu, Wednesday May 31, 2023

KNA by Wangari Ndirangu

Three hundred and ten registered schools countrywide have undertaken the Kenya Mathematical Olympiad 2023, organized by the Centre for Mathematics Science and Technology Education in Africa (CEMASTEA). 

In Kiambu, 11 schools registered for the contest, geared towards a critical role in development of thinking skills, creative problem solving with the overall goal to help create a positive attitude, towards Maths among learners as well as help improve performance in the subject. 

Speaking at Ngenia Secondary School, Limuru Wednesday, which is one of the schools that registered for the contest, John Oyuga from CEMASTEA said many a time students pursuing subjects at the university level have been missing out because of performance at the secondary school.

“With mathematics being key in all faculties and careers requiring it to be applied, this is the reason we are promoting this contest although we cannot say Kenyan is badly off. We are actually good,” he said.

Oyuga noted that they want to build a pool of critical thinkers, aimed at encouraging and motivating students so that they just do not look at producing, but are open to critical thinking, beyond just calculating.

The contest, he added, will see the overall winners register for another Olympiad and proceed to another level, where they will compete with others from outside the country internationally, where winners will be picked from round three.

“The selected teams will be trained in preparation for a more challenging regional and international contest, so we will have to take them through some more training on applications and not just calculation,” Oyuga said.

Ngenia High School Principal Paul Warutere said CEMASTEA and local learning institutions have done a tremendous job of capacity building teachers in both Mathematics and Sciences, which has come a long way in enabling the teachers to deliver their core mandate.

“When it comes to learners, the teachers are able to give them quality skills and it is a big plus to our learning institutions as far as performance of sciences and mathematics is concerned,” he added.

The principal explained that most of the teachers have undergone the in-service training and therefore there is that very direct impact on institutions, but of great importance is that the learners are able to go through the sciences in a much-demystified manner that makes the understanding and comprehending of the concepts much easier.

For the Kenya Mathematical Olympiad, Warutere said his school has a strong team of 50 representing students drawn from forms 1, 2, 3 and 4.

He said it is through such kind of activities where students compete with counterparts from other institutions within the country that they get motivated to work even harder.

“I am sure that the final analysis will see the young students register improvement. Sciences and Mathematics are being embraced by our learners and that traditional mentality that they are difficult subjects or out of this world has seriously changed,” he said.

He added that the boys now walk through the science subjects confidently and as they even graduate to institutes of higher learning, they are taking courses that are science oriented.

“There is definitely a paradigm shift from the preferred subjects like humanities, technical subjects and languages. Science is now competing favorably well,” Warutere said. 

Mose Bernard, the head of Mathematics department at Ngenia high school said they have been preparing well for the contest and what they did as a school was an internal evaluation, where they came up with 100 students from across board of both junior and seniors and selected 25 best from the juniors in form 1 and form 2 and another 25 from seniors; form 3 and 4 to participate.

The students, he noted have taken the exam well with some of them saying it was a good paper and definitely hope to proceed to the second and third round of the contest.

“Mathematics is just another subject, most students however normally have the wrong notion that it’s a hard subject. It is just the attitude. We are fighting that attitude, From form one to four we have seen most of them changing their attitude once they are engaged,” Mose said.

Kelvin Ngure, a form three student who was among the 50 students that participated in the contest told KNA that they were well prepared and that he was sure from the expected results that they will emerge as one of the top schools.

‘Personally I love math, it inspires and challenges me. Although some students get intimidated by the subject, it is just a notion and attitude, which affects performance,” he said.

Ngure said he wants to be a pilot in future and working towards this, will require him to major and pass in sciences, which he was doing.

Some 310 schools countrywide undertook the mathematical contest today and from this number the top 750 students, 250 juniors and 500 seniors will be invited to round two, which will be held at CEMASTEA regional centers in July of this year and from the second round, 50 top students will move to round 3 of the competition in September 2023.

The contest has been categorized in three rounds, round one, which today saw 25 questions completed in 60 minutes and without using calculators, round two will be numerical answer questions, while the third round of questions will require a full solution.

The partaking students will receive a certificate of participation upon completion, while the top students will receive certificates of merit.

CEMASTEA Olympiad contest is being done in partnership with Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC), domiciled at University of Waterloo in Canada and University of Nairobi.

 Courtesy ; K. N. A