Renedo de Esgueva (Valladolid), (EFE).- Only the mind and an abacus is what the 150 children from nine communities have had this Saturday to achieve the challenge of making 70 calculations in less than 5 minutes.
Thirteen columns, two rows and 65 beads are the numbers of a Japanese abacus, ‘soroban’ in the Japanese language, and the door to dozens of arithmetic operations ranging from simple addition to square roots and exponential equations.
The mind and the abacus of children from nine communities
This has been the tool that has accompanied more than 150 students from fifteen provinces of nine communities this Saturday who have participated in the tenth National Mental Calculation Championship, held in Renedo de Esgueva (Valladolid).
Only the mind and an abacus have been used in this competition by schoolchildren between the ages of 5 and 13 divided into ten levels who have participated to overcome the challenge of performing 70 calculations in less than five minutes.
There has not been a calculator, screens or Artificial Intelligence to help them: only their mind and their “soroban”.
The “soroban”, an ancient tool
“We work with the Japanese abacus, an ancient tool that provides abilities in cognitive development, attention and concentration that are a complete success,” Antonio Palos, a member of the Aloha management team, explained to EFE.
The organization hopes to reach half a thousand attendees, including family members and schoolchildren from Madrid, Toledo, Valladolid, León, Burgos, Soria, Lleida, Mallorca, Asturias, Coruña, Almería, Málaga, Huelva, La Rioja and Valencia.
One will attend the world championships in Malaysia on July 30
The Spanish champion will come out of the contest and one of them will attend the world championship that will be held in Malaysia on July 30.
In fact, it was in Malaysia where the Aloha Mental Arithmetic educational program was born, which since then has not stopped accumulating followers due to its positive effects on the academic performance of students.
The improvement is not only in mathematics, but in other skills such as memory or concentration, “which today is something that families demand a lot.”
Despite being a traditional method that is widespread in Asia, having an abacus in which the upper row has a count worth five and the bottom row another four worth one, is not at odds with technology or with the teaching offered by schools and institutes.
After that learning there is also time for the calculator
“One thing does not take away the other,” says Palos, who explains that this tool is complementary to the rest, since at school children will learn to “add and subtract in the traditional way, here they do it differently and, later, They will use the calculator.
However, the organizers of this tenth edition did seek to ensure that the location in the Valladolid municipality of Renedo de Esgueva was away from noise.
It is about minors after taking the test “could spend the day in a green area, without machines, because we wanted to connect the traditional abacus with nature.”
The location will also make most of the participants come from educational centers in the province of Valladolid.
And so there have been from Lourdes, Compañía de María La Enseñanza, Agustinas or the CEIP Joaquín Díaz de la Cistérniga, among others.
A very different situation from that derived from the covid-19 pandemic, which Antonio Palos describes as “a before and after” since he has not been able to hold meetings for almost three years.
But start to recover normality, as demonstrated by more than a hundred children who “play math” with a ‘soroban’ in a town in Valladolid. EFE