Math champs awarded scholarships

from The Jakarta Post

For some students, math is a nightmare. But for 30 elementary and secondary students, math now means money, with the government awarding them scholarships for their efforts at three international mathematics competitions.

The students competed at the Po Leung Kuk 11th Primary Mathematics World Contest, the Changcun Youth Mathematics Inter-City Competition and the International Youth Mathematics Contest, all in Hong Kong.

The competitions involved elementary and secondary school students from around the world.

The Po Leung Kuk Contest, held from July 14 to 18, involved 176 students from 14 countries. Four Indonesian competitors in two teams brought home silver and bronze medals.

"It was quite difficult, but we were able to manage. But the funny thing is we didn't get the gold medal because we made a stupid mistake," said Toby Moektiono from SMP Kanisius, Jakarta.

"We were supposed to write 22 for the answer, but we wrote it as 23 because we miscalculated one times one as equalling two," he said smiling at a press conference held at the National Education Ministry on Friday to congratulate the contestants.

One student who did bring home gold was Harfiyanto Dharma, a student of elementary school SD Santo Yoseph 1 in Denpasar, Bali, at the International Youth Mathematics Contest, which was held from July 29 to Aug.2.

Director General for Basic and Middle Education Management Suyanto said the government would give scholarships for those who succeeded in bringing recognition to Indonesia on the international stage.

"A tingkat (level) scholarship will be awarded to the students, meaning if they are currently studying at elementary school, the scholarship will be valid until they finish junior high," Suyanto said.

Suyanto encouraged the 30 students to continue to pursue other activities besides math, such as sport and music.

"They also have to be able to make as many friends as possible, so their lives will be in balance -- in balance between left brain and right brain," he said.

Left brain thinking is more logical, rational, analytical and objective. Right brain thinking is more random, intuitive, holistic, and subjective.

Before the contest, the students had to take part in two intensive quarantine sessions in Jakarta, where they learnt special methods for solving the problems they would face in the contests.

"A day after we arrived in China we also did our final preparations for solving the problems," said Jennifer Santoso, a student of SMPK 2 BPK Penabur, Jakarta, who participated on the Changcun Competition.

How to get kid like maths

Some kids do not enjoy math because they just can not see the point of it. Unlike reading or painting, all those mathematical symbols and numbers don't seem to mean anything.

What you need to do is show them how important math is in the real world.

Tell them stories about the great engineering feats throughout history, such as the great pyramids of Egypt, the Hoover dam, or the latest space missions to Mars, nothing would have been achieved without mathematics, and mathematicians.

Involve your kids in some real world math away from the classroom. Find something your child is interested in and relate it to math in some way. For example, when you're in a store, ask your kids to add up the prices and keep a running total while you shop. Then ask them how much change you should expect at the checkout.

Kids may become mentally "stuck" on a topic because they're only looking at it in one way. Perhaps they need to step outside the box and see it from a different angle.

Show them the beauty of alternative viewpoints. Help them to see situations from other people's perspective.

Get them into the habit of exploring different ways of solving a problem. Even something simple like tidying up a room can have several possible "solutions" or ways of approaching it.
Crosswords and lateral thinking puzzles are good for this kind of flexible thinking.

Eliminate negative statements like "math is hard" (even if you thought of yourself as a math dunce at school!).

Explain how everyone has a natural ability to do math and that solving math problems isn't so different from solving other kinds of problems in life.

The Number: 1089

Pick a 3-digit number where the first and last digits differ by 2 or more...

Consider the "reverse" number, obtained by reading it backwards.
Subtract the smaller of these two numbers from the larger one.
Add the result to its own reverse.

Why is this always equal to 1089?

This is one of the better tricks of its kind, because the effect of reversing the digits is not obvious to most people at first... If the 3-digit number reads abc, it's equal to 100a+10b+c, and we have the following result after the second step:

| (100a+10b+c) - (100c+10b+a) | = 99 | a-c |

The quantity | a-c | is between 2 and 9, so the above is a 3-digit multiple of 99, namely: 198, 297, 396, 495, 594, 693, 792 or 891. The middle digit is always 9, while the first and last digits of any such multiple add up to 9. Thus, adding the thing and its reverse gives 909 plus twice 90, which is 1089, as advertised.

The Number

What's in a Number

Anyone who thinks of maths - thinks of numbers first of all.

Without numbers the world would be a strange place: imagine going to a bank and saying "I want to withdraw some money", without numbers you won't be able to say how much money you want and the bank won't know how much you have or how much to give you!

Some of the earliest records of numbers show that they were used many thousands of years ago for counting how many animals you owned or how much grain you had to feed your family and animals or pay your workers.

You may have met people who seem to be really cool because they can quickly work out calculations with numbers in their head. You DON'T need to be clever to do this sort of thing all you need to know are the secrets of approximation.

The use of numbers and basic "sums" or operations on numbers as they are sometimes called (e.g. addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) is obvious in today's working world. You may ask "why bother with numbers anymore as calculators, electronic tills and computers will do all the work for you".

What if you were running a business in the country and your calculator broke - would you turn away lots of customers and profit by closing the shop and driving miles to get a new calculator? If you have mastered handling numbers, then it will be no problem to carry on serving customers and working out any calculations with a notepad and pen. Also remember that someone has to program the calculators, computers and electronic tills in the first place - so provided you understand the mathematics of numbers - that person could be you!

In maths, numbers are called different names:

Real Numbers These are rational and irrational numbers (see below for an explanation of these).

Rational Numbers These will always have terminating or recurring decimals. This means they can always be turned into a fraction. e.g. 0.25 is a rational number and it can be also represented as the fraction 1/4.

Irrational Numbers These can not be turned into a fraction. They are non-terminating (i.e. they go on forever after the decimal place with no apparent pattern). Ö2 is an example of an irrational number.

Integers These are whole positive or negative numbers (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3).

Prime Numbers These are numbers with only TWO factors (factors are numbers which exactly divide into another number). Prime numbers are only divisible by themselves and 1. Note that oddly enough, 1 itself is not classed as a prime number.

Square Numbers These numbers are formed by a number multiplied by itself (1, 4, 9, 16...).
__________
From easymaths.com