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SARAH
JANE CUA, the Filipino teenager who bagged the title of
Asia-Pacific Sudoku champion in the BRAND’S Sudoku
Challenge in Singapore on July 12, is leaving again
Friday (July 18) for another international contest: the
International Mathematics Competition (IMC), also in
Singapore, this weekend.
Sarah
Jane and 80 other Filipino “mathletes” supervised by the
Mathematics Trainers Guild-Phils. (MTG) are joining this
year’s event, one of the biggest in the math-education
world, with contests in all fields of math for various
levels from Grade 3 to senior high school.
The MTG,
led by founder-president Dr. Simon L. Chua, has just
come back from twin victories this week: Sarah Jane’s
winning the BRAND’S Sudoku challenge in Singapore; and
the
Philippine Team’s emerging as one of the overall
champions gold) in the Po Leung Kuk 12th Primary Math
World Contest in Hong Kong, where seven elementary
students achieved perfect scores in the contest that
drew 44 teams from 12 countries.
Dr. Chua
and MTG officers showed the trophies won by Sarah Jane
in Singapore; and by the Philippine team in Hong Kong,
at a send-off lunch hosted for MTG by the BusinessMirror
at the Cherry Blossoms Hotel in Manila.
The MTG
team expressed hope that the “winning streak” would
continue in the IMC in Singapore this Saturday.
The MTG,
a national association of mathematics educators, was
busy supervising the participation of four Philippine
teams in various contests this week: besides the sudoku
challenge, the primary math contest in Hong Kong and the
upcoming IMC on July 19 in Singapore, a Philippine team
is currently competing in the Hua Bei Sai mini-math
Olympiad in China.
At the
sendoff lunch organized by the BusinessMirror and MTG,
Sarah Jane Cua attributed her victory to hard work,
prayers, the tutelage of MTG, and her parents’ solid
support. She debunked the common impression that only
Filipino-Chinese students are good at math: “Math
doesn’t choose age, or gender, or race, or economic
class,” she said in Tagalog. |
