“Maths can be fun." That was the message to approximately 2,000 secondary school students who attended the Math Fair at UWI, St Augustine campus on Thursday.
Math, a subject that has been the bane of many students’ existence drew record numbers to UWI, and, by the looks on the students’ faces and the nostalgia on their teachers', the day was thoroughly enjoyed. They got the full UWI experience, save and except, the visit to Gate Boys.
Kaira Paul, associate professor at the department of mathematics explained, “Students will have a bunch of games and activities. They will go around, try different booths in the quadrangle and auditorium. We have a display of the competition winners who presented models and posters. In the lecture theatre, we have an opening ceremony, a math feud, and lectures regarding the application of maths in the real world. We also have tours of the campus and the Faculty of Science and Technology in particular.”
Feature speaker and actuary Kyle Rudden delivered a speech written entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). He said it took longer to read the speech than the 20 seconds AI took to write it.
Speaking to a packed lecture theatre, Rudden said, "I know some of you may be thinking, why do I need to learn maths, I'm never going to use it in real life. That is not true, nothing could be further from the truth. Maths is not a subject you study in school. It's a tool you use in different aspects of life: finance, technology, engineering, medicine and everything in between."
[caption id="attachment_1000812" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Hillview College students attend the Maths Fair at the UWI, St Augustine campus on February 9. - Nicholas Maraj[/caption]
Rudden said, “Unfortunately, our educational structures don't necessarily meet our social needs. I remember looking at my daughter learning the cosine rule. The only thing I ever used it for was calculus to pass exams. Yet, after decades I haven't touched trigonometry. It's good for engineering, but my daughter has to do that to get a CXC maths pass, even though all she wants to do is take care of children.
"I respectfully suggest that many of the topics on the basic maths syllabus are not necessarily relevant. What we see in the CXC syllabus is designed for people who want to go on to university and do math or STEM – science, technology, engineering and math.”
He said a teacher’s ability to connect to differently-abled learners has a lot to do with a student's ability to learn math, recalling from his own classroom experience.
One teacher who worked with students at their learning level was Linda Deonath, the founder of Math Fair and who was awarded for her contribution.
Deonath, a teacher at St Joseph's Convent, St Joseph, said, “It started in school to try to inspire the students to like maths, generally people don't like maths.
“So for seven years, we had it in school. We had a website: www.nerdherdmathclub.webs.com, where you could see all the previous things we had.
“We started to invite other schools in the
