LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
For the past two years I’ve been helping coach students to go to the annual South East Asian Math Competition. This year, I was appointed to the leadership position of vice-chair. I was quite nervous going into this position because it entails a lot more responsibility than I had before. I was confident about the planning since organisation is one of my strengths but executing these plans was quite challenging.
I had to create a short term plan until October break which would involve the different rounds of the competition, challenging math, and open ended problems designed to challenge participants. However this is much easier said than done. The first step in order to do this was to clear out the SEAMC google drive folder in order to access various resources. This took me almost three days to do since it was so disorganised before.
After this was done, the next step was to plan what we would do each session and we did this through a presentation with individual slides outlining what we would do each week. An example of how a session would look is below.
What proved most challenging was executing this plan. Due to a combination of my introverted nature and the size of the group we were meant to be guiding, getting people to listen was extremely hard. Especially since half the people present were older than me, it was hard to gain their respect. This made us realise that we had to make our sessions much more individual activity based rather than collaborative until we split them up after October into their skill level groups. It was important that I had flexibility in my plan and was able to draw upon resources when asked rather than pre-planning. It helped me realise that for the future, we would have to get to know the group dynamic before planning any activities or training.
Over the October break, we are planning on splitting up the large group into smaller groups based on their skill levels and designing a custom plan for each group as we felt that this would work better.
