Rural Outreach, one of Math World Nepal’s core projects, aims to provide free tutoring and mentorship to students experiencing educational disadvantage in rural and remote communities in Nepal. To jumpstart this project, members from MWN conducted various sessions on Competitive Mathematics for students of Bloom Nepal school for three months.
Bloom Nepal School is a network of schools established in 2013 to create passion-based learning institutions that help students of all socio-economic backgrounds come together for a shared purpose of intellectual development. Many students in this school come from a family with severe financial issues. A significant number of these students don’t even have their parents. During the pandemic, Bloom Nepal Foundation also started the BloomED project. It aims to create an online platform for learning different high school-level subjects in Nepal. Inside the project, Bloom Nepal has also built the Competitive Mathematics course. It intends to help students prepare for Math competitions.
What defines Math World Nepal is our goal to help as many students as possible to learn Mathematics in a meaningful way—in that students use it throughout their life. Teaching Competitive Mathematics was a foot forward in doing so because students uniquely tackle Math problems while studying it. Covering starter-level college topics on disciplines like Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics, Competitive Mathematics provides students with an opportunity to master their concepts and comprehend tricky questions effortlessly. Such a course gives conceptual clarity and encourages students to imbibe critical and analytical thinking. The importance of having these skills in learning motivated us to help the students of Bloom Nepal School study the course that their own Foundation had created.
The initial phase of our Outreach was anticlimactic, to say the least. Though the children were interested in Mathematics and were willing to participate in our sessions, they were uninterested in learning vast concepts. It was because students were challenged all the time, and they were not prepared for such a thing. Their previous classroom experiences rarely induced logical and analytical thinking. So, we crafted a learning module where fun and learning were blended to create a memorable and knowledgeable experience for them. Through presentations, practical demonstrations of Geometric shapes, YouTube videos, open discussions, and quizzes, we created an interactive and engaging atmosphere where students lost anxiety and felt free to express their ideas. Moreover, to ensure that students continuously strived and embraced new challenges, we conducted sessions with Olympiad participants. In these sessions, the guests talked about their experience in the field of Competitive Mathematics and also recalled the glory of representing Nepal at the International Math competitions. In those sessions, you could see the gleam in the children's eyes as their interests and aspirations resonated with those participants.
The difference between the first few weeks and the last few weeks was stark, to say the least. The children, who were reluctant to try anything on their own in the initial weeks, transformed themselves to learn collaboratively. While solving any question, they requested not to be assisted, until they attempted the questions. If anyone got stuck, everyone in the class supported that person. To my conscience, helping those children learn various disciplines, opportunities, and experiences of Mathematics has most certainly been a rewarding experience. However, the fact that the group of children we taught transformed themselves to be more confident learners, was probably MWN’s biggest achievement. The radiance in the students’ smiles when they finally grasped an intricate idea or tackled problems without anyone's assistance is unrivaled. We thank Bloom Nepal school for providing us with the tutoring opportunity and are extremely motivated to work on such endeavors in the future as well.
