Exam season is underway and it comes with a whole lot of stress not just for the students, but also their parents. While different students have different levels of liking (or dislike for that matter) towards various subjects, how often do we see numerous troubled faces outside an exam hall just before a ‘mathematics’ exam?
The fear of mathematic or ‘mathophobia’ has grown among students of various age groups over the years and that has not just affected their results for the subject but also their perceptions towards it with many choosing to opt-out of continuing to learn math at the first opportunity they get.
According to 2018’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a survey that provides data on children’s schooling and learning for a representative sample of children across rural India, 35.7 per cent of rural Indian children in Class 1 could not recognise numbers from 1-9, while the statistics from the 2019 report indicate that 56 per cent Class 8 students are unable to perform division and 70 per cent class three students fail to do basic subtraction in rural India. In Maharashtra as well, the (ASER) 2019 ‘Early Years’ survey was conducted in Nagpur district. The survey reached a total of 60 villages, 1,212 households, and 1,474 children in the State.
Maths has become such a worrying subject for students nowadays that they are refraining from taking it up after Class 10. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had also introduced a basic maths paper from as many children are fearful of the subject.
Ours is the country that has produced math geniuses like Srinivasa Ramanujan who introduced infinity, Aryabhatta who invented zero and Shakuntala Devi who was called a human-computer and so many others. However, there’s been a steady decline in the number of students opting for maths in higher education in post-independence India. This has resulted in a huge shortage of maths teachers in Indian schools, universities and colleges. Has the quality of maths education in India gone down? If it has, what can we do to overcome it?
The unavailability of good maths teachers in schools or a boring theory-based teaching method could be the reason why most students are afraid of the subject. With the world growing competitive day by day, traditional classrooms alone cannot engage students. There is a need for interactive learning, especially for maths.
In an effort to change this scenario and to make students look at maths in a different light, Bengaluru-based Avneet Makkar’s Education Tech start-up CarveNiche Technologies Pvt Ltd has introduced an application called ‘beGalileo’ that uses the latest technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Gamification to teach maths to students. A highly personalised maths learning programme, it starts with a test which uses algorithms to identify why a child is unable to grasp a certain maths topic and helps in identifying the problem. The child’s learning curve is monitored throughout the programme and a circular is set based on the child’s learning curve.
Avneet Makkar, CEO & Founder, CarveNiche Technologies Pvt Ltd, who is also a mother of a 10-year-old girl. said, “Fixed Mindset is a problem when it comes to mathophobia. More and more students believe that they can not do maths. Students with maths anxiety often choose to take fewer maths-related courses and consequently perform poorly in the subject. By tackling maths anxiety early, we may be able to break this vicious cycle before critical academic choices are made.”
“Research says that if maths is looked at as a fun subject at an early age, before the age of 6, then the child is less likely to have maths anxiety issues. Technology can be an enabler and help children deal with mathophobia. It’s a proven fact that Gamification can help deal with the phobia to a great extent,” Makkar added. “Maths games and bringing maths concepts into everyday conversations and helping your kid visualise the implementation of maths in everyday situations to fix real-life issues can all lead to the child loving the subject,” she further added.
Launched in 2016, the ‘beGalileo’ application not only improves conceptual understanding along with reasoning and questioning skills towards maths but also provides women with the chance to be entrepreneurs as they can run home-based ‘beGalileo’ centres. Currently, there are almost 700 home-based beGalileo centres across the country which are being run by women entrepreneurs, including many such centres in Pune as well.
Manju Panpalia, a mother of a six-year-old and maths teacher, runs one such centre in Pune and gave her account of how technology has helped change the way students look at the subject. “The school system is such that the ‘whys’ behind a particular maths concept are not clear which results in the child not being able to learn a particular math concept. Negative feelings toward mathematics greatly affect children’s ability to perform well and even the desire to continue learning mathematics,” Panpalia said. “Nowadays, with technology, it is possible to understand maths concepts in an easy and fun manner. There are maths games available in AI-enabled softwares, which help the students to view math as a game rather than a difficult subject,” she added.
Since apps like this could easily reach the students even in the remotest places, it could even benefit students living in rural India. The schools across the country should start implementing AI-based interactive programmes. If students are taught in an interactive and fun way, they could easily overcome their fear of maths and our country will keep on producing math wizards. To all the students, I say, do not fear maths, overcome the complications and face it head-on!
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector has boomed all over the world in the past few years. In computer science, AI is also known as ‘Machine Intelligence’. According to the leading AI textbooks ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach’, the field as the study of ‘intelligent agents’: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term ‘AI’ is used to describe machines that mimic ‘cognitive’ functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as ‘learning’ and ‘problem-solving’.
