Having fun with their beads

Colourful beads that freely slide on wires laid within a rectangular metal or wooden frame- that’s abacus for you. One of the earliest counting devices used by the Chinese, the abacus has wonderfully found its way into present day arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Over 800 school students from Sharjah, Dubai, Abudhabi as well as from Nagarcoil and various districts across the state gathered at the Rotary Balbhavan, Panampilly Nagar the other day to participate in the 33rd regional abacus competition. ‘BRAINOBRAINFEST 2012’ is organised by Brainobrain, an abacus training institute for children, with centres across the country and abroad. Little tots aged 4-14 years, dressed in green T-shirts of the training institute were all ready to crack arithmetic sums using the abacus technique. A question paper comprising 75 questions were allotted to each student with a time limit of three minutes.

“Abacus learning is a wonderful way to improve concentration and multitasking skills of children,” said V L Sajan, manager, Brainobrain. Abacus training, offered in ten levels beginning from Little Brainobrain(Bob), takes children through various stages of  large arithmetic calculations.

After three months of training with the abacus, it is taken away and children are trained to imagine the abacus and perform calculations by counting the beads in this imaginary abacus. This, in turn develops imagination skills of the student.

“The major advantage of the abacus technique is the simultaneous development of the left and right hemispheres of the brain,” added Sajan. This helps to improve imagery skills.

A demo session of abacus training left one in awe after watching little children perform single digit additions and multiple digit multiplications in a matter of seconds. One gets a taste of their multitasking skills as some of them calculated 4-5 sums simultaneously, besides singing, roller skating or performing karate!

“His concentration skills have  improved. It is not only about numbers or arithmetic, but there is a holistic change in the way he looks at his subjects, as well as his personality,” said Deleesha as she spoke about her 10-year-old Arun, who was a participant at the event.

Among those who took home trophies were 79 champions from different age group categories,120 gold medallists and 96 silver  medallists.