Maths Clubs in Universities
The AMI Maths Camps have proved very successful at changing secondary school students’ attitudes towards maths. In many cases, this has led to a marked increase in student performance in mathematics as well as in other subjects. The 1st Ghana Maths Camp and the 4th Maseno Maths Camp both had significant input from university students, in terms of preparation and organisation of sessions. Both in Ghana and Kenya these undergraduate students commented on how much they benefited from being exposed to the Maths Camp. They expressed interest in bring the ideas from the Maths Camp to their fellow students at university so that they would also benefit from the resources and activities.
Because of this AMI began this initiative to support Maths Clubs in universities.
Ghana
The university students involved in the 1st Ghana Maths Camp were already members of a university maths club, MASAG-UCC. AMI is supporting MASAG-UCC by providing resources such as free educational software, activities, puzzles and mathematical games which can improve students understanding and appreciation of mathematics.
Kenya
Volunteers at the 4th Maseno Maths Camp included mathematical science and statistics students from Maseno University and Technical University of Kenya. Following the camp, these students returned to their universities and initiated their own Maths Clubs within the university. AMI has visited both maths clubs in Maseno and at Technical University and has delivered sessions on topics such as programming in Python. We have also shared the same resources that were given to the Ghanaian students so that the clubs can function independently using the resources provided.
The Next Steps
- AMI plans to visit more universities to spread the idea of a maths club and offer our support. We have already visited Maasai Mara University and Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology and there is interest in this initiative.
- We also plan to create stronger networks between the maths clubs across Kenya and Ghana. AMI can provide maths clubs with their own subdomain on the AMI website where they can showcase their clubs activities. Our hope is that this will enable the students to share their experiences of maths club in different locations and learn from each other.
- The existing maths clubs have all expressed interest in performing outreach activities to schools in the local area of their university. We think this is fantastic and it fits in with AMI’s other initiatives such as Maths Clubs in Secondary Schools. AMI will offer to train and support interested students in how to deliver activities to a secondary or primary school maths club. We will use our existing links to connect university maths clubs with schools.
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