Du Ying, Director of the Promotion Center of Hubei Abacus and Mental Arithmetic Association

We are living in a society and era featuring rapid development of informatization, and continuous emergence and upgrading of various Internet products at a surprising speed. On the foreign front, the “Apple” brand is constantly innovating, while Chinese brands “Huawei” and “Xiaomi” are trying to catch up. Thanks to this, people from the elderly to children in China can master the use of various applications in a proficient way. Everyone is immersed in the fast and convenient life brought by intelligence and enjoys its benefits. An era where a mobile phone can almost solve everything in our daily life has emerged. More and more applications are accepted and used by people, facilitating our life to the greatest extent. Recent years have seen wider use of APPs in abacus and mental arithmetic education, which enriches the form of teaching, training and competition and improves the work and learning efficiency, becoming a beautiful scenery in the inheritance of abacus culture.

I. The role of APP application at the introductory stage of abacus and mental arithmetic

As the abacus and mental arithmetic is not included in six subjects and five fields of kindergartens, no abacus and mental arithmetic courses have been set in normal universities. For many years, the abacus and mental arithmetic teachers have been trained by abacus and mental arithmetic associations at all levels or non-governmental education organizations. Compared with the three-year training and study of mathematics, Chinese and other subjects in normal universities, the training  on professional knowledge of abacus and mental arithmetic ranging from three to eight days is seriously insufficient. In just a few days of training and learning, many teachers only gain a rough understanding of the general teaching principles and calculation methods of abacus and mental arithmetic, and cannot fully integrate the knowledge of abacus and mental arithmetic and thus cannot teach it to students after returning to class. For example: When teachers who are no longer sensitive enough to numbers receive the abacus and mental arithmetic course training, their mastery of mental arithmetic is relatively poor and some even can’t grasp mental arithmetic. So they can’t correctly guide students to simulate the movement of beads, and students are in the mode of doing their own mental arithmetic, which greatly increases the difficulty of learning abacus and mental arithmetic. The APPs designed for abacus and mental arithmetic training make up for this deficiency to a great extent. Many systems provide bead animation demonstration, from which students can learn mental arithmetic, thus reducing the difficulty for teachers in classroom teaching.

In the past, a teacher who started studying abacus and mental arithmetic usually gained proficiency in teaching abacus and mental arithmetic at least half a year later. In the training of abacus and mental arithmetic teachers in recent years, the courses such as abacus and mental arithmetic APP auxiliary teaching system and training software application have been added to the teacher training courses at the provincial level. By doing so, teachers can be trained in the most efficient way, master the knowledge of abacus and mental arithmetic faster and more simply, and apply it to lesson preparation and classroom teaching. The teachers who pass the training successfully can teach abacus and mental arithmetic in the classroom, which greatly reduces the time and cost of teacher training.

II. Advantages of APP application in teachers’ lesson preparation

    For teachers, lesson preparation is an essential link. A lesson consists of three parts: teaching preparation, teaching process and teaching summary. In the teaching preparation process with APPs, teachers can input the class practice questions into the system, and set the practice questions in the classroom according to students’ practice feedback, which saves a lot of effective time for teachers. In the teaching process, teachers use the APP training system to set up classroom exercises based on the needs of the course. The practice scores of all students are saved in the system, and the type of questions with right or wrong answers are also clearly displayed; teachers can distribute each student the questions they answer wrongly to carry out targeted exercises. In this way, teachers can find out students’ error-prone points in the learning process in a timely manner, which helps improve the accuracy of calculations and lay a solid foundation for after-class summary. In the teaching summary link, teachers can clearly see the students’ right and wrong answers and practice scores in the system, which greatly facilitates the after-class summary and provides data basis for next teaching.

III. Complementary effect of APP application and traditional abacus and mental arithmetic teaching

As we all know, abacus and mental arithmetic is a product after gaining a certain degree of proficiency in abacus, and an inevitable result of the internalization of bead images. To help the students master mental arithmetic skills proficiently, we should set a lot of practice on the translation of bead to number. In traditional abacus and mental arithmetic teaching, teachers have to prepare a large number of cards for bead-number translation in the lesson preparation link, and distribute a set of exercise cards to each student. They have to spend a lot of time in both the preparation process and the practice process. In current APP training system, teachers only need to assign the required practice tests to students for them to quickly and efficiently complete various exercises. This not only saves teachers’ lesson preparation time, but also greatly improves students’ interest and performance.

IV. Application time of APPs in classroom teaching

The best age for children to learn abacus and mental arithmetic is 4-8. Children over 4 years old can start learning abacus and mental arithmetic. Children at 4 years old start to feel sensitive about numbers. If they start learning abacus and mental arithmetic at this stage, a much better effect will be achieved. However, as children aged 4 are in the mid-class of kindergarten, their attention span is very limited. In kindergartens, a lesson usually lasts 25 minutes, while one abacus and mental arithmetic course is generally 40 minutes. If two classes that involve review, new teaching, practice and other links in the classroom teaching process are successively taught, it will require higher attention from students.

Students need to take the initiative to concentrate on the knowledge taught by teachers at class. But for young children, they don’t have long attention spans. In a circumstance where students’ active attention has been basically lost, the APP teaching and training mode introduced can further concentrate students’ attention in the classroom training process and greatly improve the classroom efficiency. This is also the key of abacus and mental arithmetic to improving students’ attention.

V. Role of APP training system in after-class exercises

Affected by the structure of abaci, the calculation question types of abacus can be divided into six categories. Many teachers are not proficient in distinguishing these question types in the training process, not to mention to set exercise questions for students in classroom teaching according to the teaching content. Therefore, even teachers can’t fully grasp the key points of abacus and mental arithmetic teaching and training, neither can parents be familiar with the tricks contained herein.

Abacus and mental arithmetic learning is inseparable from practice. Daily practice is the best way to effectively improve students’ computational ability. However, it’s unlikely for our abacus and mental arithmetic teachers to meet students who are learning abacus and mental arithmetic every day. Therefore, this practice process requires the participation of parents as well. In the past homework assignments, teachers need to spend a lot of energy and time explaining to parents clearly about many issues such as: how to report questions and complete exercises. After introducing the APP training system for abacus and mental arithmetic, this problem can be well solved now. The APP training system for abacus and mental arithmetic allows students to operate the entire exercise process by themselves, while teachers can also remotely learn about and grasp students’ completion of homework and exercise effect in real time. This mode has reduced the burden on parents, receiving recognition and support from parents.

VI. Innovation of APP training system in training method and competition form

The manifestation of traditional abacus and mental arithmetic includes listening to and watching abacus, as well as listening to and watching mental arithmetic. Abacus and mental arithmetic is well known for its “fast” and “precise” calculations. With the APP training system, these characteristics can be better demonstrated. There are “flash calculation” and “marathon” projects in many training systems. Teachers use these system functions to set exercises for students in the classroom, with an aim to better exercise students’ ability to quickly calculate numbers, improve their instantaneous memory and lengthen their attention span. This is an exercise that can’t be completed by a single teacher-led course in traditional abacus and mental arithmetic.

Flash calculations and marathon in abacus and mental arithmetic competitions are eye-catching highlights in external publicity. Whenever a question type with increasing difficulty is played on the big screen, we can usually hear the audience’s surprise and applause. The heated competition scene makes everyone excited, and the rich competition forms create a more active atmosphere, all of which is conducive to the enhancement of publicity.

VII. Role of APP training system in abacus and mental arithmetic competitions

The numerical calculation competition features no emotional scores but clearly right or wrong answers. In previous abacus and mental arithmetic competitions, a large number of skilled personnel were involved in reviewing test papers and obtaining rankings quickly. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that there would be omissions and mistakes in test paper review and ranking. It’s currently very common for domestic organizers to use APP systems in competitions. The APP system can realize right and wrong judgments and score rankings immediately after the contestants submit all the answers, which greatly reduces the time for reviewing test papers, eliminates the error rate of manual operation, saves competition time, improves competition efficiency, and provides a powerful operating platform for organization of large competitions.

To sum up, the emergence of APP auxiliary and training system for abacus and mental arithmetic has reduced the cost for training abacus and mental arithmetic teachers, addressed the weaknesses in traditional abacus and mental arithmetic teaching, improved the practice contents and introduced more practice forms of abacus and mental arithmetic, which improves the enthusiasm of children to learn abacus and mental arithmetic and stimulates their interest in learning abacus and mental arithmetic. Moreover, it has lowered the difficulty of organizing events and provided good software and hardware technology support for the development of abacus and mental arithmetic.

It’s believed that in the near future, our system engineers will, under the guidance of CAMAA, develop more effective APP systems for abacus and mental arithmetic to provide strong technical support for carrying forward the abacus culture and promoting abacus and mental arithmetic education. Let us all abacus and mental arithmetic engagers advance with the times, and constantly climb new heights in the abacus and mental arithmetic cause with innovations!