WITH THE PROLIFERATION OF educational technology, online courses, and a range of enrichment offerings, parents and educators are confronted with a bewildering array of options for fulfilling the academic needs of students. This challenge is amplified for those with international mindsets and looking for ways to ensure that their children are competitive with students worldwide. As the founder and former director of a number of online and pre-collegiate programs for students around the world, over the past 25 years I have often spoken with parents and educators about what they should be doing for students from early age. Their questions range from the innocuous, ‘How do I challenge my child so that he/she keeps learning outside the classroom?’ to the highly tactical ‘How do I maximize my child’s prospects of getting into a top college in my country or overseas?’ to a host of questions in between. The most important advice I give to parents and educators alike is to foster a general love of learning and intellectual curiousity in their children and start this process early to develop children’s intellectual vitality — perhaps the attribute most sought after by universities, and also a trait that drives enduring academic performance. But how does one develop intellectual vitality? The answer is not from duplicating work a student is already doing in school through tuition or online courses. While some parents are already suspicious of the traditional tuition approach, what they fail to realise is that many online courses and programs are essentially doing the same thing. It’s depressingly common to see good schools in India and elsewhere adopt assessment and enrichment programs not tested or benchmarked internationally, and which won’t improve their students’ intellectual vitality. Students with an eye on US college placements often enroll for online courses from the US because they’re described as ‘accredited’ or ‘Advanced Placement’. Yet, college admission authorities are more interested in evidence that a student can pick and choose intelligently from among options rather than “eat everything in sight”, as they know that overwork merely exhausts students. A better approach to developing vitality, and cultivating student capability, is to draw lessons from the sporting world and look at how student abilities are nurtured and demonstrated through participating in competitions and training for them. The foundational skill students develop through participation in transnational friendly tournaments is ‘problem solving’, an invaluable skill that cuts across all domains and subjects. While such contests are commonplace in geographical regions with a rich tradition of intellectual competition, in recent years as they have expanded worldwide, they are causing widespread confusion about the quality of content and richness of the digital medium. In other words, the quality of a competitive tournament is adjudged by the experience and ability of its organisers to assess students’ problem-solving skills, its academic pedigree, and the affiliation of the tournament, than by digital bells and whistles. The AMT (Australian Math Trust) competitions in math and informatics, and the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) math competitions are…
