国际袋鼠数学竞赛Kangaroo

The sum of all numbers is 110 and when the sum is divided by 4, the remainder must be equal to the remaining number on

the square.

The answer is as follows.

Nick: 12, 13, 23, 24

Peter: 4, 5, 7, 8

Remaining number: 14

I, namely Frank, used to tell students that one of the big difference between chess and math is when playing chess, you have

an opponent who prevents you from winning but there is no one there causing trouble for you to attempt to find a solution

when working on math contest problem, but this problem has proved me wrong.

You cannot just do only school math and expect to well on Math Kangaroo Contest because the nature of Kangaroo Math

Contest problems integrates all kinds of knowledge (even games) and only possess this integrated and inter-linked

knowledge, can you solve some problems quickly.

One type of Math Kangaroo problem is to ask students to use pattern knowledge, then from there to use the concept of place

values, and then use the factoring knowledge to find the sum. The pattern may come from a student\'s understanding of

combination or even a pre-processed knowledge.

Example 2, we present the following Kangaroo Math Contest problem to help reader understand our point of view.

Five boys weighed in pairs in all possible combinations. The measured weights were 43 kg, 40 kg, 39 kg, 37 kg, 38 kg, 36

kg, 35 kg, 33 kg, 32 kg, and 30 kg. What was the total weight of the 5 boys?

We have analyzed past Kangaroo Math Contest problems and compared them with problems from other math contests and

school math to see the differences. Chinese model word problems offer one of the world best model problems for preparing

math contest problems, so we also incorporate Chinese model word problems in our math contest preparation workbooks.

Math Kangaroo Contest may consist of problems which students cannot use have any books’ taught strategies or methods to

follow. For example, the following problem needs students to estimate the answers without any method or equation to follow.

Example 3

Ella and Ola had 70 mushroom altogether. 5/9 of Ella\'s mushrooms are brown and 2/17 of Ola\'s mushroom are white. How

many mushrooms did Ella have?

Normally we teach students to match the quantity to its corresponding fractional number but in this example there is no

reasonable fraction number to match the quantity 70.

One way of solving this problem is to find a quantity to see if it is divisible by 17.

Ola\'s white mushroom must be multiple of 17.

Ola\'s number of mushrooms Ola\'s number of white

mushrooms Ola\'s number of brown

mushrooms Ella\'s number of mushrooms

17 2 15 70 - 17 = 53 which is not multiple of 9.

34 4 30 36 is a multiple of 9

51 6 45 19 which is not a multiple of 9.

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What does it take to be a good math contestant?

In 2015, we taught a grade 2 girl and she impressed us a lot on her ability. She has some abilities which her peers may not

possess. We analyzed her and found she has the following characteristics. She got to 10% in Canada and also Vancouver

Silver medal. We have found many of our students who did well in math contests have some special characteristics which

many other students seem to lack.

She has a very good visualization ability. In 2015 Canadian contest she got problem 18 correctly while many of our same

grade students could not get it tight. Some of them could not understand it even after I explained.

Not only she could understand the meaning of word problems, she is able to analyze them. Many our students could

understand the meaning of word problems but lack the ability to analyze them.

She could even create word problems. Sometimes, I would use my students’ names when I created word problems right in

front of them. She saw it and one day she told me that she would like to create a word problem and below was the word

problem she created.

Sample of math, chess, and puzzles integrated worksheet

We have created many math, chess, and puzzles integrated workbooks, this is one way to make students not feel bored

when working on math computation problems. Below is one example.

Please contact 微信 ho6042634321 for example.

Rule: All the fractions must appear exactly once in every row and column. The number appears in the bottom right-hand

corner is the end result calculated according to arithmetic operator(s) and chess move(s) as indicated by darker arrow(s).