Limit Breakers

Rural areas have on average only four advanced math courses whereas urban areas have eight on average (Graham, 2009). This lack of advanced math courses can lead to students not being able to challenge themselves with more difficult math courses and may encourage them to take easier courses that offer excelling students less learning. Larry Ferlazzo (2020) also states that “Less is More in Math Distance Learning”. He suggests trying to focus on the application of these different lessons. He also suggests providing students with an avenue for social interaction to make them more engaged during classes. We plan to integrate these points in our different classes.

Lack of advanced math was an area of concern for the Yellow Boat Foundation. Yellow Boat saw that many students from those remote areas were excelling in math and didn’t feel challenged enough by the current math curriculum. They saw how other exclusive private schools in Zamboanga excelled in different math competitions and felt that underprivileged students can also excel as well if given similar opportunities. They felt that the region could benefit from challenging, competition level math lessons.

This project aims to teach excelling students college level or Olympiad level math lessons in order to prepare them for university. This project also hopes to help students appreciate math more by challenging them with lessons that are outside of the school curriculum. It can also improve the different school’s competitive math team and allow them to compete with schools that have access to trainings from Metro Manila.

1. Conducting of Diagnostic Exam

2. Lessons in Algebra

3. Lessons in Combinatorics

4. Lessons in Geometry

5. Lessons in Trigonometry

6. Conducting of Final Exam

We had our lessons checked by different trainers from the Mathematical Trainers' Guild of the Philippines. Our sessions were hosted by Yellow Boat through Zoom. They also helped us setup our Facebook Live Stream and also assisted us in disseminating our materials such as session recordings and slides.

Our timeline can be viewed in the following spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wP-UvSJf1bfMszEdn_2CSsiYc5c7IXouOzeertZn_Ug/edit?usp=sharing

The mean score increased from 3.16/10 to 4.47/10. This is a 41% increase in scores. This shows that our program led to a fairly noticeable increase in test scores despite the test also slightly increasing in difficulty. While these scores are relatively low (below 60%), we saw a large improvement showing that this program can still be potentially continued to get further improvements.

We were also able to create a Messenger and FB group where students can view different resources and collaborate with other students by solving challenging math problems.

Through the different training sessions, we were able to give prizes that totaled to around Php500 through our "GCash Questions", these were questions during a session wherein the first person to successfully solve them got a small cash incentive from Php50-Php100 depending on the difficulty of the question.

Our project helped the students learn to appreciate math. They were able to see how their high school lessons can be extended into more advanced problems beyond their comfort zone. We were also able to help the community bond through our training session wherein they would learn advanced concepts together. The teachers were also given materials that can be used to train future students advanced mathematics.

There was one point when one member of the group was cancelling quite often due to him having outside competitions in journalism and biology. This was fixed however, as he was able to finish all of his assigned sessions and we were able to substitute him sometimes when he was absent. Another problem was that attendance was starting to decrease towards the end, this is probably due to the program being quite long and schoolwork starting to pile up towards the middle of the school year.

In the long term, we expect the students to have an increased appreciation for mathematics and problem-solving. It can also possibly stir their interest in certain specific topics such as Combinatorics or Coordinate Geometry. In the short term, it will also prepare them for any future math topics in Senior High School and University. 

For the schools’ long term, it will improve the competitiveness of their math teams. In the short term, the materials can also possibly be used as future training materials to improve the schools’ math training. Some of the lessons might even be able to make it into the schools’ curriculum in the future.

We will work with Yellow Boat Foundation and give our materials to them so that they can be used in future classes by other teachers. If possible, our materials can be used in a more conducive face to face environment to ensure learning, attendance, and community. We’re also looking into providing more trainings for future batches of students but these would most likely be held online if we are to provide the training due to the community being located in Zamboanga.

The main social issue that we are trying to tackle with this project is the unequal access to advanced education. We were able to tackle this by providing advanced education to a batch of excelling students and providing their schools with materials that can hopefully be used for this advanced education. This problem however is much more systemic, we found that lots of students didn't have time due to personal reasons such as housework or out of school jobs(more privileged students don't face these problems) or due to a lack of internet. Until these much more systemic problems can be tackled, we feel that having access to advanced education and accessing that advanced education will always be much easier to those with more resources.

We feel however, that our actions were a step in the right direction. Our program could inspire schools to pursue their advanced math programs more heavily and could also lead to interest in studying advanced topics in physics, chemistry, or economics. Education is the key to a better future and this is one small step towards that.

We found that students ended up dropping out of the program due to a lack of time due to schoolwork or personal reasons, a lack of motivation, or lack of internet. We feel that the first two things can be studied more and possibly solved through other projects. It could be possible to experiment with a slightly lighter schedule or having in-person trainings in Zamboanga for a much more personal class. The second one can possibly be fixed by experimenting with different incentive structures or trying to find different kinds of students who might be more motivated to take time out of class to learn about math.

We feel that the next iterations of this program should have set incentive structures from the start. This could be in the form of questions with prize money, quizzes with prizes, or announcing top scorers. This could lead to more student retention and a much more lively program. We also recommend meeting the students in-person to have more personal interactions with them that may lead them to attend more classes and listen more during sessions.