SEAMC: Action + Demonstration

CAS

LO5: Working together to achieve an outcome

Planning and running SEAMC was one of the hardest yet most rewarding things I have ever done. This year, our organisational committee was faced with the challenge of preparing students for the competition while also partaking in the logistical aspect of hosting. I can confidently say that the outcome of our efficient and targeted planning was a success, especially in regards to how our school’s team performed. We were able to take home many medals and placed 2nd overall, which was an unprecedented feat in UWC’s history.

A major challenge that my fellow planners and I faced was during the week of the competition however. We were given the task of opening the competition with an hour long presentation as well as providing help with running the different rounds. We were only given a week’s notice for this and without our effective communication and organisation, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. This was also a personal challenge for me, because I absolutely dread public speaking. I grew into a more confident and self-assured person after presenting to over 300 people and helping them throughout the weekend. It was a great experience of personal growth.

It was thanks to the fellow organisers, teachers, and staff that we were also able to execute this event successfully. We obviously faced challenges with logistics, timings, delivering questions, and the results, but it was ultimately through the support of everyone that we were able to overcome them. For instance, Joanna (another organiser) and I faced the problem of having a lot of volunteers drop out on the last day, so we had to divide the work between ourselves to get everything done instead. It was challenging, but worth it.

Something interesting that we also had to address was an important ethical dilemma. As the organisers of the competition, we had access to everyone’s tests, results, and the questions in the rounds. But we had to be incredibly responsible about maintaining their secrecy. It was an interesting for me to experience such an unfamiliar responsibility, because normally this sort of stuff is taken care of by teachers or other adults. I think it was an important lesson for us to learn for the future; we now knew the etiquette and the trust that comes with leadership.

SEAMC Highlight Reel

SEAMC (Planning + Implementation Season 1)

CAS

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.