A child working on maths problems in a classroom. Photo: Unsplash/ Greg Rosenke
Thousands of students from 300 schools are competing in a maths competition.
As many as 15,000 children between the ages of 7 and 13 are participating in the Times Tables Rock Stars Mathematics Competition, a UK-based competition now touring the world.
Organiser Bruno Reddy told Morning Report he was running two competitions in parallel, one for the North Island and another for the South Island.
"The children are going to be battling away answering times-tables questions, so that's multiplication and division up to twelve times twelve."
Questions are fired at them over 30 minutes and "they don't know what's coming".
"The questions are generally leveled at the child's stage so that levels the playing field."
Reddy said in recent years schooling had shifted away from rote memorisation of the times tables, but it was coming back.
"For a while it was seen as maybe an old way of doing things. Actually the prevailing winds in education are changing, they're coming back around to the idea that knowing the times tables off by heart are going to help with maths confidence and maths skills."
Students also needed to grasp the core logic of multiplication and division, he said.
"We want to commit them to memory but we also want the children to understand the tables.
"We want them to understand that what they represent is 'groups of,' so three times ten means three groups of ten. I want them to know they can combine two groups, like ten groups of two plus two groups of two makes twelve groups of two. I want that flexibility of thinking to make them more robust mathematicians."
The event would live-streamed on YouTube, a first for the competition.
"This is the first time we've done this and I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous.
"We've got 12,000 to 15,000 students playing from over 300 schools. We've got visits from a couple of ministers and the local MP on the ground, this is fairly high stakes for us," he said.
The competition was set to begin at 9.30am on Thursday.
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