Dubai: Emirati students achieved a virtually perfect success rate at an international mental math contest in Cambodia recently.
Out of the 11 Emirati contestants, there were 10 winners in a number of categories, including one champion and three first runner-ups in the ‘24th UCMAS Abacus and Mental Arithmetic International Competition 2019’.
UCMAS is the Universal Concept of Mental Arithmetic System that has trained more than 1 million students worldwide.
In the latest contest in Cambodia, the UAE students were competing against 4,000 pupils from 40 countries, answering 200 maths questions in just eight minutes with the help of only visuals. Some of the questions involved 50-digit numbers and decimals.
In total, 41 out of 52 students from the UAE won awards in different categories. Besides Emiratis, others winners comprised 17 Indians, four Jordanians, four Sri Lankans, two Iraqis and one student each from Oman, Lebanon Philippines and Bangladesh.
Out of the winners, 10 students were awarded champion trophies, while two hearing-impaired children achieved honours by securing the first and second runner up positions in the visual arithmetic contest.
Students in the basic and elementary levels were permitted to use the abacus tool for addition or subtraction. However, as the levels progressed to intermediate, students could only use the mental method to do the addition, subtraction, multiplications and division questions.
V.G. Soundari Raj, Managing Director, UCMAS UAE, said: “Achieving such a glorious win for the UAE just days after we celebrate the 48th National Day reflects the true spirit of our Rulers’ vision to promote education and learning. It was great to see participation of such a diverse group of students belonging to different nationalities, which simply underlines how well every community in the UAE is doing in terms of education.”
