Maths World Cup comes to Africa – quietly

03 June 2014 | Johannesburg | MGLI

Feel it! It is here. This is a statement that invokes memories of 2010 when South Africa hosted the football World Cup. Every South African knew about it and did something about it by participating one way or another. Fast forward to 2014 and the first ever International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) competition is being held on African soil and very few people know about it. The maths geniuses from all over the world are descending on Cape Town in July yet there is a deafening silence with regards to the event.

The 55th International Mathematical Olympiad will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, from 3 to 13 July 2014. The IMO is a problem-solving contest for high school learners, held in a different country in July every year. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959, with seven countries taking part. Today, more than 100 countries take part, representing over 90% of the world’s population. The IMO is the oldest, biggest and most prestigious of all the international science Olympiads.

The 2014 IMO is presented by the South African Mathematics Foundation (SAMF) and will take place at the University of Cape Town. The event is endorsed by the Department of Basic Education and the Department of Science and Technology of the Republic of South Africa.

The event serves as a platform for South African learners to benchmark their performance against international standards. It is paramount that the event be publicised so as to motivate learners and teachers from previously disadvantaged backgrounds to take up the challenge to form maths Olympiad clubs in their schools and communities. This could be the trigger for a mathematically savvy country if marketed to all strata of the South African population. The current silence about the Olympiad is shocking considering the country’s dismal ranking in mathematics and science. Not enough has been done to publicise the event. In a survey conducted by MathsGenius Leadership Institute (MGLI), 73% of the 53 respondents did not know about the IMO being held in South Africa this year.

Is the South African maths Olympiad team going to be a pushover in the competition? How can the country use the event to bolster mathematical performance? What is the strategy to get the rural black child involved in the competition?

The South African team is currently not representative of the country’s demographics as most black teachers do not have the skills to teach Olympiad-type problem solving. It is an unwritten pre-requisite that a teacher ought to have done at least second year BSc in Mathematics and is a good, creative problem solver. This has led to teachers shying away from the competition and the learner is the biggest loser in all this.

To help correct this, MGLI in ran a maths Olympiad tutorial in Midrand as part of its overall strategy to nurture talented quantitative leaders who will use mathematics as a springboard for general problem solving. The maths Olympiad is a conduit for African leadership capacity building as Africa has to solve her own problems using home-grown talent.

Beneficiaries of the MGLI maths Olympiad training include Gallagher Combined School and The African Union International School (AUIS). In the tutorials, learners were taught how to think like mathematicians in order to be good problem solvers. Once the learners had grasped the different problem solving strategies, Olympiad past exam papers were introduced and learners were fully engaged and owned the process of solving them. The SABC Education sponsored book, “The Mathematical Genius in You” by mathematician Edzai Zvobwo was distributed to the learners as a tool to improve their problem solving capabilities. It was a successful exercise that presented learners and teachers with unconventional mathematics problems yet proved that any problem can be solved if addressed correctly.

For sustainability, it is necessary that a broader strategy to up-skill teachers be adopted with the assistance of crowd-sourced expertise from the community. A lot of engineers, actuaries, chartered accountants, programmers have a fair appreciation of maths Olympiad-type problems and their expertise can be harnessed for the benefit of the black learner.

Let us all wish the South African team all the best in the World Cup and hope they will do us proud. Bring back gold, do it for your country.

Edzai C. Zvobwo is the CEO of MathsGenius Leadership Institute (MGLI). He is a renowned mathematics researcher and motivational author. He can be contacted at info@mathsgenius.co.za

Author: Patricia Mareya from MathsGenius Leadership Institute.
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Edzai Zvobwo, CEO of MGLI teaching learners at GIBS Photo: P. Mareya/MGLI

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