(Photo/Chinanews.com)
On July 22, Beijing held the fifth "Shenmo Cup" International Mental Abacus Junior Master Tournament, with more than 1,000 contestants from 18 countries. Amazingly, many foreign students performed just as well as their Chinese counterparts.
Abacus, also called Suan Pan in pinyin, is a handy calculation tool invented by ancient Chinese in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). Constructed as a wooden frame with beads sliding on parallel rods, it is be able to help with basic calculations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and square roots. Mental abacus, an even quicker way to calculate by mentally visualizing an abacus, was incorporated into some math classes in China to improve students' visual cognition and working memory since 1980s.
In recent years, together with Chinese language courses, China's courses on abacus culture and mental abacus have been popularized in many Western countries. Being introduced to America in 2010, mental abacus was announced as an official course at Barnard Elementary School, San Diego, U.S., with 110 pupils enrolled in 5 classes in 2016. To this day, dozens of elementary schools in San Diego have included mental abacus into their curriculum. "At first, I thought mental abacus was just simple math. But it turned out to be related to Chinese philosophy. We can feel the diversity of the world by learning it!" Monica, a student's parent, told People's Daily.
Research has shown that mental abacus training is beneficial to young people's coordination of senses, intellectual development, and mathematical cognition. According to Yang Chuanzhen, a Shandong-based scholar in regional culture, mental abacus is more than just a technique reflecting Chinese morals and wisdom. With its brain-training function, this ancient calculation method will continue to shine in classrooms at home and around the world, despite the lesser use of physical abacus in real life.
It is worth noting that mental abacus is not the only Chinese mathematical wisdom borrowed by Western classrooms. The Chinese decimal multiplication table, which can assist people to memorize multiplication up to 9×9 with ease, was reportedly translated into English and taught in math classes in the United Kingdom in 2015.
