By Niyi Okiri

The CEO of Sima Abacus Mental Maths Academy, Mr. Donald Anthony, has urged governments and ministries of education to introduce the Abacus learning aid into school curricular.

Anthony made the call during the maiden edition of the Sima Abacus National, Club and Inter School Competition held at ICAN Centre, Amuwo Odofin, Lagos, on Saturday, saying that “maths is the mother of sciences and all subjects.”

A traditional, hand-operated calculating tool used to perform arithmetic functions by sliding counters or beads along rods or in grooves, “Abacus, which is more of mental calculation, should be employed when you want to bring out the best in children, especially through competitions from the classrooms to the national level, as you’ve seen today.”

The Sima Abacus competition is a brain development and enhancement of educational activity because the Abacus, as a tool, deals with four basic operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and that’s arithmetic.

“At the face value, what you see is like mathematics but then, by manipulating the beads of the abacus, with the tips of the fingers making contact with the beads through the nervous systems, it goes to activate the brains and the more efficient the brains become, you begin to see high level of concentration, observation that brings about imagination, which gives birth to creativity and rippling effects into other subject areas.”

Anthony said that before this maiden edition of the national competition, “we have been having centre competitions in schools and at club levels and we have been organising intra-school competitions for schools registered with our academy.”

He said, however, that the competition was geared towards bringing all the schools and the clubs together for pupils of grades 1 to 6, with over 800 pupils of between 3 to 13 years of age from 18 participating schools out of the 48 registered in Lagos.

He assured that the competition is going to be a yearly event and, with the presence of the Sima Abacus programmes in Jos, Plateau State, and Enugu, in Enugu State, and “from what we are seeing here today, next year’s event would be bigger.

First position winners in the six categories of competition in the intra-school Sima Abacus championships were Ezeh Valerie from Krystabel School, Oshodi, for the year 5 and 6 category; Okunlola Roqabah from Krystabel School, for the year 4 category; Elukemi Erioluwa from Kids Network, Egbeda, in the year 3; John Ademuyiwa from Kids Network, Egbeda, in Category 2, and Valentine Ezeh from Krystabel, Oshodi, in the Category 1, respectively.

The first place winners went home with N150,000 cash each, while the second and third place positions went away with N80,000 and N50,000, respectively.