MathScore Philippines, October 29, 2014

Day 3 got off to a tremendously early start.  I had to be dressed and ready to leave the hotel at 6am.  Miraculously, jet lag wasn't too big of an issue.  I was regularly waking up around 4am anyway, so I guess you could say my internal clock was OK with the idea of an early start.  Henry picked me up as usual, and we headed toward one of the provinces.  Traffic in the Philippines can be really crazy.  Any American would likely be surprised by the dense levels of traffic that can be seen at 6am.  One thing they do well in the Philippines to facilitate flow of traffic is to have excruciatingly long traffic lights.  In many cases, the long delay at intersections is managed not by traffic lights, but by ridiculously brave people that direct traffic every day.  Waiting for 5 full minutes is not unusual, but once you get going, you get to go for a while, so overall, they manage their traffic pretty well in the Philippines!

At Canossa Academy, they arranged a special assembly for my visit.  They have more students than can fit in this auditorium!

Now here is something you don't see every day.  These students performed the "MathScore Dance".  MathScore Dance?  Are you kidding me?  They would clap their hands 3 times, stomp 3 times, then clap to the left, clap to the right, then raise their hands over their heads in an arc and say "Fireworks!"  In this photo, they are doing the fireworks portion of the dance.  If you aren't a MathScore user yourself, your screen lights up with fireworks the moment you've just mastered a math topic.  Most students won't see this event even once per day, so when you earn it, it's kind of a big deal.  If you see me in person and ask me about it, I can teach you the dance too :-)

Here I am saying a few words before beginning an awards presentation.  The top students at every grade were set to receive awards.  Given that I played no role whatsoever in preparing any of this, it felt kind of weird having the honor of actually handing out the awards.  Thanks MathScore Philippines!

This is the first student that received an award.  As was the case with several younger kids, I had to grab her hand in order to shake it.  Some kids were looking down.  It takes a lot of confidence to have your head up high the first time you've ever been recognized on stage!

After a seemingly endless stream of students, we took a final group picture with all of the winners.

Here I am with the Canossa staff.  The people on the left who are not in uniform are part of MathScore Philippines.  From the left, the non-uniformed team members are Dennis, Sue, and MJ.  In the middle in white, that's the head of school, a Sister of the church that runs the school.

True to Filipino hospitality, the Canossa staff offered us lunch.  They were so incredibly polite and gracious.  They didn't even want to sit down with us.  Clearly there were extra seats, so after we were seated, we insisted that they sit with us.  They were embarrassed to sit down, and did not touch the food themselves.  We had a nice conversation and we were sorry when we had to leave to make it to the next appointment.

Here's a nice photo of teachers at Our Lady of Caysasay.  We had taken lots of plain photos, but I chose to post one of our goofy ones.  

Although we had just eaten lunch at Canossa, they immediately fed us here as well.  The food was delicious.  Afterward, I spoke about our geometry proof engine with a small group, then when the whole group arrived, I spoke about why I created MathScore, and then I had something to say about women in engineering.  Here's what I said:

I talked about some research I recently read about that was pretty disturbing.  Suppose a high-achieving girl and boy enter their first year in college and take some engineering courses.  Suppose both of them earn mainly B's and C's, but the girl scores slightly better than the boy.  Most of the time, the boy sticks with his engineering major and eventually graduates, getting a high-paying job.  In many cases, the girl thinks she isn't good enough and switches to an easier major where she can get straight A's.  So this girl might actually have more potential in engineering than the boy, but due to confidence issues, she never finds out.  My message to the staff was to be aware of this, and to please educate their top female students so that they have the grit to finish their engineering degrees when they get into college.  The world needs more engineers, and I think women are the key to meeting that demand.  

They created a nice thank you card with a bunch of handwritten post-its.  They were such a great group.  I hope something I said helped somebody!

This is the first administrator to ever achieve the rank of Fleet Admiral in MathScore, which means she scored at least 200,000 points.  I suppose it wouldn't have been proper for her to wear her "BEAT MY SCORE" shirt to this occasion, but I'm sure she has one.  I wrote "You are Awesome!" on her certificate and signed it.

After we left Our Lady of Caysasay, we took a short break a restaurant with a nice view.  I'm sure the view would be prettier on a sunny day, but it was quite nice nonetheless.

Hmm...what are these kids playing at Santa Rosa Elementary?  It's MathScore EduFighter!

OK, my turn! I had to take on their top 4 students.  Naturally, I chose the Engineering Station, which I designed to be the most important station in the game.  I went on the defensive, upgraded all of my skills to raise my boost bonus, and added tons of deflectors.  The other team sent barrages of torpedoes at me and also used their shield boosters a bunch.  The downside of their approach was that those actions (particularly shield boosters) consume a lot more power than the defensive actions that I took.  I waited until they ran out of power, then I turned to offense and blew up their ship.  Should I have let them win?  Nah!  It's more fun this way.  They kept chanting "Rematch! Rematch!" after the game.  I didn't have time to play another, but I appreciated the enthusiasm!

Here I am with their top MathScore students.

They prepared a cute little "Steven Yang" banner.  I was allowed to take it home.