052 – Maths Camps: Engaging Minds, Expanding Horizons

[00:00:00] Santiago: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi, David.

[00:00:18] David: Hi, Santiago. What are we discussing today?

[00:00:21] Santiago: Today I want to start with how we met. That’s not going to be the topic of the whole episode. But I think it’s nice motivation to get started.

[00:00:33] David: If I remember right, you were at King’s College School and you were teaching with Emily at the time, my cousin.

[00:00:41] Santiago: Yes, I was in a school that is an independent school in London where, I don’t know if they still do it, but if a member of staff stayed for seven years they gained the option of taking a sabbatical for a term, not an extra holiday, but it was a very relaxed time to do something related to education. And one of the members of my department reached that stage. And he went on a trip to the top universities in the UK, talking to admissions tutors to better understand admissions to mathematics degrees to feed that back into our university preparation work.

Of course, the whole term without a number of staff, we couldn’t distribute all the work to the remaining staff in the department. So we got a person to cover, brilliant maths teacher, Emily Hobbs then, now Fleming.

And we had another colleague who joined the school for only one year. He was going to join for a bit longer but his interest was always elsewhere. His parents were from Pakistan and he was very interested in going back to the region to promote education or improve education, make his small contribution. And there was an interesting project where he got hired to become the head of mathematics for a brand new school that was being created with a meritocratic philosophy where, well, we could do a whole episode about that.

[00:02:32] David: Yes.

[00:02:32] Santiago: And I have mixed views on that. But anyway, it was a very interesting project and I was then starting to get engaged in an educational project in Zambia, where we had partnership with a rural school in Zambia. And Emily was thinking of creating these maths camps and she organized a meeting, actually, the objective of the meeting, if I’m not mistaken, was to discuss the possibility of embedding GeoGebra applets into online textbooks.

[00:03:08] David: Yeah, that’s right. I remember that.

[00:03:10] Santiago: And she invited you.

[00:03:12] David: Yes.

[00:03:14] Santiago: You came along and we discussed a bit of GeoGebra, GeoGebra for the listeners is, is it still open source?

[00:03:22] David: It is open source. It’s still open source, but with slightly other constraints around it now, but it’s a, it’s a very exciting open source project, which enables mathematical constructions, which sort of bridge between geometry and algebra.

[00:03:37] Santiago: So we met, that summer I was busy, but it was the first ever maths camp organised by you.

[00:03:49] David: Was it the first? I thought it was the second.

[00:03:50] Santiago: No, it was the first. I was there for the second.

[00:03:53] David: Oh, it was that you weren’t there for that first one. Okay, it was the first one we then did, and you came for the second. That’s what I thought, yes. That’s right.

[00:04:04] Santiago: Yeah, this was in June and early July I was flying to Zambia and I had commitments in August already. I would have loved to go to the very first one, but I missed it. So, the real focus of this discussion is not how we met, it’s Maths Camps.

Because that was, I think, for us, the biggest outcome that came from that meeting. For our relationship. Because I then started going to Maths Camps, and of course back then you still went to Maths Camps. You still helped very actively organize maths camps and we started our professional relationship as well as our friendship through that.

It’s a beautiful project and we want to describe it in this episode.

[00:04:59] David: Okay, and just to say a little bit more, so the, the Maths Camp approach of course is not new, lots of other people have done Maths Camps in all sorts of different ways. But what we did is we did develop an approach which has worked in low resource environments, which has proved to be sustainable, but back then when we started we thought it would be scalable.

And it hasn’t proved to be scalable. So that’s a whole other part of the discussion that we could get into, and is again a big part of the inspiration. We’ve now not been, either of us I think, to a maths camp in almost 10 years.

[00:05:31] Santiago: Almost 10 years, yes.

[00:05:34] David: Yeah, I think it’s, yeah. I went cold turkey. I had been to every single maths camp and then went cold turkey and haven’t been to a maths camp since. And they’ve grown and they’ve sustained themselves and they’ve evolved in very interesting ways based on the same principles that we set them up on. And it’s great to see that every year there’s a number of them across the African continent happening in different ways.

[00:05:56] Santiago: Yeah, and I only ever went to Kenyan Maths Camps. I haven’t seen a Maths Camp in any other country.

[00:06:03] David: Oh, yes, and of course, I should say just very briefly, it went from Kenya to Ethiopia, and then from Kenya to Ghana, and then it’s been to seven or eight different countries now, and there’s about five or six regular every year.

[00:06:18] Santiago: I think there’s a couple happening every year, in Kenya at least.

[00:06:22] David: So Kenya, of course, now, they have evolved and emerged into different ways, where they are not all following the same basic format. But there still is a primary maths camp, where there are the international volunteers, and it happens over a two week period.

What they’ve done in Kenya, of course, the reason they have multiple in a year is they now run a lot of maths camps just with the local team that doesn’t need to have the preparation week because they’ve run so many of them. But there is still this concept of this two week period with a preparation week.

[00:06:55] Santiago: And I would like to highlight, one of the things I like the most about our maths camps is the inclusivity of them and the different philosophy that we have. A lot of the maths camps, not all, but a lot of the maths camps that are well known tend to be related to the top students, to push them ahead even further, to prepare them to pursue, or stimulate them to pursue careers in STEM, to prepare them for mathematical competitions, and so on. So it’s grabbing the top end and pushing them further. What we did is very different.

[00:07:38] David: Yeah. Well, let me clarify what we conceived is very different. Interestingly in Ethiopia, they do work with top students and this has been an interesting thing. So, and I think one of the things which I think is really important is our principles, the basic structures are reusable in different ways and they can be used in that way. But that’s not how it was conceived.

[00:08:04] Santiago: And how it was conceived is what I want to focus on, at least for a while. Do you want to describe it? Because I think you’ll do a better job than me.

[00:08:14] David: I mean, one of the things that was important in this, and there are elements in Kenya and elsewhere, where many students would never consider themselves as people who could go to university. And this is something which is quite common in different contexts. And there’s certainly attitudes around mathematics, where this is hard and this isn’t for me.

And then it’s one of the things which I find very sad in some ways, if you’re a parent and your child can’t read, then you’d never say that’s okay. You’d sort of encourage them and you’d support them and help them to sort of understand reading and writing is important in life. Whereas if you have a child who can’t do maths, many parents feel it’s okay to say, oh, that’s okay. I couldn’t do maths either.

[00:09:00] Santiago: I think, David, you missed a very important part.

[00:09:04] David: Okay.

[00:09:04] Santiago: You got involved in a lot of education projects in Kenya while you were there with colleagues, Zach, and others. And they mostly revolve around teacher training. They did amazing trainings with loads of teachers and they had pretty much zero impact.

[00:09:24] David: Not zero impact. It was, in a training of let’s say 50 people, there would be one person who would take it up and we felt that wasn’t enough. Negligible impact, I accept. Zero impact is harsh!

[00:09:38] Santiago: Okay, it had very limited impact because teachers are busy and they loved these innovations, they went, they got very excited by them, they got back to school and their paperwork and their marking and their demands and the things they learned in the trainings, they just did not happen. So Zach had the brilliant idea, I think, of saying, why don’t we skip the teachers and go straight to students?

[00:10:06] David: No, that’s not how he framed it, which is really important. He did say, why don’t we go straight to students? But it wasn’t about skipping the teachers. And this is really critical because teachers were engaged. They were part of the process. And actually, again, I’m going to come back to the Ethiopian, which of course you weren’t there, but the Ethiopian one, this was fantastic because actually, one of the times when we did this in Ethiopia, the teachers who were there said we’ve been told all about student centred learning and all these other things, but we’ve never experienced it until now.

And so part of that element was that actually going and trying to train teachers on some of these things without them experiencing it was nowhere near as impactful and effective as actually just having them in the room observing it happen. And that was a really important insight. So you know, and this is where we’ve had other episodes on the importance of language.

Zach never wanted to skip teachers. He always wanted to engage and enable and support them. But he recognised that it’s very difficult to do something you’ve never seen. So if you’re asking teachers to do student centred learning, they have to experience it, they have to see it, they have to observe it first. And that’s part of what his thinking was while going directly to students.

[00:11:32] Santiago: So going back to the story you had that conversation with Zach, and you conceived this idea of maths camps.

[00:11:38] David: And importantly, I said I can’t do this. You know, I was a university lecturer and I said, you know, this is something where much as I’d love to do this, I’m not used to interacting with school kids, I don’t know, I’m used to interacting with university level students, but I’m not used to interacting with school kids.

We need to get some teachers involved, and this is where I said, I have a cousin. This is where Emily came into this picture. I have a cousin who’s a maths teacher in the UK, and I think I could, you know, convince her to come and have a holiday in Kenya with me. I’d help arrange it and sort it out, and she has a working holiday for two weeks, where the first week she helps organise it, and the second week she helps deliver the camp.

[00:12:30] Santiago: And correct me if I’m wrong, but it wasn’t a very hard sale.

[00:12:33] David: No, we’ve got on well, you know. Cousins who both studied maths at university, we’re the only two in our family who did so. Nine cousins in total, the two of us always got on very well.

[00:12:44] Santiago: And you have similar views of this in terms of how to learn maths through games and through practical things.

[00:12:52] David: I mean, again, when we were growing up, whenever we’d meet, we’d just play games. That’s what we did, you know, all sorts of games. That was just always part of both of our upbringings. Both of our family were very privileged in that sense. And so that element of the importance of play, the importance of, you know, using games as part of this card games, and others.

[00:13:12] Santiago: And the importance, or the recognition, maybe not while you were growing up, but when you became more mature as mathematicians and educators, the realization that it’s not just about learning the mathematics, but also learning about reasoning skills, logic, deduction, thinking abstractly, developing strategies.

[00:13:37] David: Exactly. And, and the role that gameplay had in us developing those skills to build our own mathematical competencies, if you want. We got on well, and when I suggested the idea for her, not only was she up for it, she decided to convince one of her colleagues. And he came out as well.

So we had two proper school teachers and then we had a whole load of sort of more academic people. We had a professor from Oxford. We had one of his PhD students. We had a whole range of people who got involved in actually making sure we got a diversity of different people who are coming in.

And then I had a whole range of my students in Kenya, not just Zach, but a lot of his colleagues who were then actually the bridge.

[00:14:22] Santiago: And when you say your students, you tend to refer to your masters and PhD students. You also had undergraduate volunteers.

[00:14:31] David: Not the first year. This is interesting. In later years, we did. In the very first year, they were all postgraduates, the ones who engaged in this. Many of them actually had positions. There were a few of the lecturers as well in the department. And I think we had a couple of teachers as well. So we had a local counterparts. We had the international counterparts and the idea was this was an experience for them to interact with one another and get to know one another and learn from each other, while having one week from zero experience beforehand to prepare a camp for the students who would come in the second week. And that’s what happened for that very first time.

And there were many, many other principles that came out on this. The element of the play element, how we structured the day, including physical activities, you know, all sorts of things which sort of were part of the DNA ,if you want, of the camps, which have survived to this day.

[00:15:28] Santiago: But let’s go back briefly to the philosophy and what makes a difference to other camps, because I interrupted you when you were discussing the philosophy because I thought the history of it was important. But now let’s go back to the philosophy.

[00:15:41] David: I was explaining how it’s often acceptable for parents to say, you know, it’s okay, I didn’t do maths either. So we wanted to take people, not just who wanted to be at maths camp, but people who didn’t want to be at maths camp, who didn’t like maths, who didn’t want to do maths, but were struggling with it at school and so on.

But we felt that we could, you know, help them to engage and to think actually. And you’ve got to remember that maths is a barrier subject. In Kenya, most people who don’t get to university, broadly, don’t get the qualifying marks because they failed maths. There’s very few people who actually get good grades in maths and don’t make the passing grades in university.

I mean, Zach did this analysis as part of his MSc project. And the set of people who get good grades in maths and don’t get the qualifying grades for university is almost zero. So it is one of those barrier subjects. Where people who are bright, who are smart, don’t get to progress academically because they don’t succeed at mathematics.

[00:16:50] Santiago: And there’s a whole range of reasons for their lack of success, which we will not get into in this episode. We might get another episode about this specifically.

[00:17:00] David: Well, we can discuss it in another episode, but the simple truth is it’s so complex that I only know bits of it, and I’ve been looking at this for 15 years plus, and it’s really hard.

But what we do know is that if you take such people and you put them into a maths camp where, you know, they know it’s about maths, but they know they’re afraid of maths, but they’ve got, forced to go there by their parents or they just sort of got encouraged to go by family members, whatever it might be, by members of their community.

[00:17:30] Santiago: Strongly encouraged in some cases.

[00:17:34] David: Yes, strongly encouraged by members of their community to go to this event, even if they didn’t want to be there. And you put them together in an environment where for a week they actually enjoy themselves and they engage in playing games and so on, and being exposed to mathematics in different ways, and with these really stimulating activities. Then you find that some of them’s attitude changes overnight, over a week. And this is the thing, we never believed this before, that over a week, the attitudes to maths can change. And then what we found, to our amazement, is that actually, just that change of attitude from that experience in that one week can turn around the fortunes of that student.

[00:18:20] Santiago: And before we get to the happy stories, I think there’s another aspect of the philosophy of how it was conceived originally, and I think this got consistent throughout all the countries. It’s a maths camp that is not curricular, because there are other maths camps targeted at similar audiences where it’s mostly reinforcement of what they do in school.

This is non curricular mathematics. It’s all mathematics that the participants would not be exposed to at school in any shape or form.

[00:18:53] David: Exactly. And I think that was a really, ah, it was a really powerful decision right at the beginning. And we made it very explicitly, partly because we wanted to be able to take students from anywhere in their schooling process.

And if you had to assume that they’d sort of seen something or not seen something, then it changed everything. So by taking things that nobody sees at any point in their schooling process, everybody’s on a level footing. And this is fantastic because you get people, you know, very different age groups suddenly engaging with the same material but coming from different perspectives. It’s wonderful, it happens, and… extracurricular is important.

[00:19:30] Santiago: Let me give one example: just inflate a balloon, start at the North Pole, travel to the equator, turn east, do a quarter of the equator, turn north, go back to the North Pole. You just drew a triangle with three right angles and that’s because you’re doing it on a sphere rather than on a flat surface.

And that’s the sort of thing that we presented them, and how it was conceived. We were looking at interesting mathematics that they would not look at, or see, or hear about. Plus the games, plus fun physical activities. It’s so powerful, the combinations.

[00:20:13] David: The other thing I loved, but it, and it’s, I think it’s still been done in every single MathsCamp since. And I think it’s always been fine, that we always had this sort of amazing grouping of topics. So that there was actually a small element of curriculum, if you want, to the maths camp, which emerged in the preparation week.

I still remember doing, we invented this sort of methodology, which I don’t think is still used in the same way, but where we had this amazing brainstorming where everyone would just say, just like you’ve just given an example with the, you know, I want to sort of have a triangle with three right angles to it because it’s on a sphere, that as an idea would then go in and a session would be built around it.

And so we’d have this brainstorming session where people just threw out all these ideas and then before we selected them we had this way of then grouping and creating these themes and these arcs through this and that gave us structure and it gave us a way of organizing. All this happened in the preparation week. In the first years, that preparation week had no materials to go on.

And so everything was built from scratch. Yes, we would use international materials in different ways, but there was nothing custom built for these audiences. And we hadn’t done this before. So everything was built from scratch in a week. Oh, it was great fun.

[00:21:34] Santiago: It was hard work as well.

[00:21:37] David: It was really hard work. [Laughs]. But it was, it was quite an experience. I mean, everybody involved learned from it. And that was another one of our principles. You don’t come to a maths camp if you’re not going to learn. And that’s why I stopped going. You know, it’s not that I couldn’t learn if I went to a maths camp now, but actually by me not going, once I reached that point where actually I knew roughly how these things were run, and I wasn’t the only one, other people did as well, actually for me to allow other people to learn and to continue to grow themselves, you have to give them space.

And so once the structures were there, it was great. Then other people stepped up and they learned how to do this. And everybody should always be learning at least.

[00:22:19] Santiago: And I think the first instance of that was when I went, I think it was my third camp. You tended to be quite a strong voice in the first few Kenyan maths camps. I took your place. And I did my best to include Zach, and Zach and I pretty much run the camp and very often I could see you smiling in the back, thinking, I could read your mind almost thinking, okay, I can now stop coming.

[00:22:52] David: That was the transition periods. Once there were people like yourself who were coming in, who were able to do this and work with people. And as you say, I mean, Zach now has done this so many times in so many ways, and he has so much experience on this in different ways. It’s great to see how he’s grown through this process. But he’s not the only one, there’s so many. And this is part of the point. And it’s hard to do, it’s hard to step back.

You know, the very first two, and the first one you were at as well, you know, there were a lot of people there, but my voice was very strong. And it was maybe too strong, but it needed to be, because we were still learning how to do it.

[00:23:31] Santiago: Yes, we were including groups that brought different aspects into it. We had a history, a storytelling group.

[00:23:39] David: We had a lawyer, didn’t we, in that one? Was that the one we had the lawyer? Oh, it was great!

[00:23:51] Santiago: Anyway, I think we’re getting towards the end of our time, maybe we’ll do another episode on this because there’s so much to say about this, but I think we should tell a couple of the stories that came out of it.

[00:24:05] David: No, I don’t think this episode is about the stories who came out of this because we could actually do those episodes with some of the people who have gone through that.

[00:24:13] Santiago: Okay.

[00:24:14] David: You know, there’s two of them who were at that very first maths camp and who are now part of the Kenyan team there. So maybe they should tell their own stories. But I think what we should finish with is, as we’ve got into some of the principles and some of the ideas behind this and how we met, one of the powerful learnings that I took from this whole approach, is exactly this idea of brain circulation.

And this isn’t talked about enough, but there’s a lot of worry in different circles about issues of brain drain and real talent sort of being lost from low resource environments in particular. And one of the things which I felt was so powerful about the approach that was set up, was this element, and I’m going to come back to that second maths camp, your first one there, where I had a strong voice. And then part of the reason that my voice was so strong there was, we had a really large number, I don’t know, something like 10 international volunteers in that camp?

[00:25:19] Santiago: Yes, because one of the teachers brought five students with them.

[00:25:24] David: Yeah, exactly, and so there’s something like 10 international volunteers. And then there was a whole local community. And so a big part of my loud voice there was about trying to bring together these two groups coming from very different perspectives and to make sure that there was the power dynamics there because of my position of power in both of those communities, that the power dynamics amongst them was more balanced and right.

And so using the power I had to be able to enable that circulation to be happening and the growth to be happening. And you talked about the fact that just a few years later you and one of the Kenyan, he was an MSc student when you first came in, one of the Kenyan counterparts, were then running the camp together.

And that building of those relationships, to enable those collaborations to form, and to grow and to emerge, that was one of my great learnings, at that period of time, was that role of bridge builder, building collaborations. And I would argue that if there’s a legacy, which is much bigger than the maths camps themselves, which has come out from that learning for me, it is the power of putting in place structures that enable collaboration and to not focus on the single, the narrow aim of what you’re doing, but to have this multipurpose event where everybody was learning, everybody was growing.

And that’s what made it so exciting.

[00:27:10] Santiago: On that note, David, let’s call it a day. Thank you very much.

[00:27:15] David: Thank you.