UB hosts a math fair for primary school students

Brian Plummer

The University of Belize through its Primary Education curriculum today put off a math fair. The purpose is to encourage interest in one of the most challenging subject areas in primary schools curriculum. Adjunct Mathematics Lecturer at UB, Brian Plummer along with his students came up with creative and fun ways to learn statistics, algebra and problem solving. Students from across the Belize District attended and participated in the innovative math games. Plummer spoke to News Five about the event.

Brian Plummer, Adjunct Mathematics Lecturer, UB

“The idea of the fair is literally a fair, as you can see, where you play games and win prizes. There is food and everything. The idea is to make math fun, relevant and interesting. Generally, it caters mainly to the primary level; we do have one or two high schools visiting, but it is primarily primary education. However, we do cater to high schools. And the whole idea like I said, if you build the foundation, the rest of the education system in terms of math education should improve. If you look at the P.S.E. that we just had, the results is usually dismal, around only fifty percent or less passes, which is by no stretch of the imagination, good. And therefore, we believe that if somebody likes something, they’ll put an interest, they are going to work hard and they are going to learn.  We cover from statistics, algebra, up to basic computation. Because we invite schools and they could bring from standard one to six, we make sure we cover the entire curriculum. So therefore, it covers the entire primary curriculum and some of the secondary curriculum. So it is a very wide content area because they are put into various groups and each group does a particular area. So one group, could focus on algebra and another group; so you have the whole primary school syllabus being covered in some aspect or the other.”