Why We like Math Kangaroo Contest?

Frank Ho, Amanda Ho

Ho Math Chess Learning Centre
Vancouver, Canada
January, 2015
The Contest-Game "Math Kangaroo" originated in France in 1991 and quickly became very popular
among students in many European countries. Several years later, the association "Kangourou sans
frontieres" was founded and it now organizes the event. The contest's main purpose is to promote
mathematical thinking and stimulate an interest in math, by providing students with an opportunity to
compare their abilities against the abilities of other students, from different countries around the world. In
the past several years, the geography of the participating countries has been extended outside Europe, to
USA, Paraguay, Mexico, Canada, etc.
In 2011, over six million students and hundreds of mathematicians from 46 countries played the game,
world-wide. More information about the contest is available at www.mathkang.org
We like Math Kangaroo Contest because the problems in the Math Kangaroo Contest are ingeniously
created, students not only need to have a good training in preparing, they require some creativity and deep
understanding of math concepts as well as to be able to link, organize, compare, and summarize
information.
Because Math Kangaroo Contest problems foster student's creativity and the understanding of math
concepts. It steers the training direction to an overall understanding of many math concepts and
interconnecting them together. Some Math Kangaroo Contest problems are mathematical puzzles in nature
which are in line with Ho Math Chess teaching philosophy. We have included one sample of our math,
chess, and puzzles integrated worksheet at the end of this article for reader's reference. Good math contest
contestants not only care about getting the correct answer, they also enjoy the process of thinking on how
to solve the problem, I have included one word problem created by one of our students in this article.
Below, we give some examples to show how interesting and challenging Math Kangaroo Contest problems
are.
Example 1, the following problem appears in 2007 Canada Kangaroo Math Contest (CKMC) grade 7 and
8.
The following 3 3 table contains nine natural numbers. Nick and Peter erased four numbers each such
that the sum of the numbers erased by Nick was three times as great as the sum of the numbers erased by
Peter. What numbers remained in the table.
4
1
3
7

1
2
2
4
5

8
14
23

This problem is interesting because in fact the numbers are placed in a 3 by 3 square but they have nothing
to do with the square at all, students must be able to spot this. Second of all, the guess and check is not a
good method in solving this problem, so the solution is not to find what numbers have been selected by
two persons, the number of persons actually does not matter to the solution either.
This problem also gives a feeling that an excellent math contest student must also well verse in language
so he or she is able to analyze the language to be able to understand the problem from math point of view.
A student who is not good at commanding language then the chance of doing math contest well is not very
high.
The problem is actually to find out what number should be the remainder when the sum of all numbers is
divided by 4. The problem has been worded into a story such that the English language sounds to direct
students to find 8 numbers instead of just finding one number. Students must be able to decide what
strategy to take instead of blindly following what the problem seems to lead to.
The sum of all numbers is 110 and when the sum is divided by 4, the remainder must be equal to the
remaining number on the square.
The answer is as follows.
Nick: 12, 13, 23, 24
Peter: 4, 5, 7, 8
Remaining number: 14
I, namely Frank, used to tell students that one of the big difference between chess and math is when
playing chess, you have an opponent who prevents you from winning but there is no one there causing
trouble for you to attempt to find a solution when working on math contest problem, but this problem has
proved me wrong.
You cannot just do only school math and expect to well on Math Kangaroo Contest because the nature of
Kangaroo Math Contest problems integrate all kinds of knowledge (even games) and only possess this
integrated and inter-linked knowledge, can you solve some problems quickly.
One type of Math Kangaroo problem is to ask students to use pattern knowledge, then from there to use the
concept of place values, and then use the factoring knowledge to find the sum. The pattern may come from
a student's understanding of combination or even a pre-processed knowledge.
Example 2, we present the following Kangaroo Math Contest problem to help reader understand our point
of view.
Five boys weighed in pairs in all possible combinations. The measured weights were 43 kg, 40 kg, 39 kg,
37 kg, 38 kg, 36 kg, 35 kg, 33 kg, 32 kg, and 30 kg. What was the total weight of the 5 boys?
We have analyzed past Kangaroo Math Contest problems and compared them with problems from other
math contests and school math to see the differences. Chinese model word problems offer one of the world
best model problems for preparing math contest problems, so we also incorporate Chinese model word
problems in our math contest preparation workbooks.

Math Kangaroo Contest may consist of problems which students cannot use have any books taught
strategies or methods to follow. For example, the following problem needs students to estimate the answers
without any method or equation to follow.
Example 3
5
Ella and Ola had 70 mushroom altogether. 9

of Ella's mushrooms are brown and

2
17

of Ola's

mushroom are white. How many mushrooms did Ella have?

Normally we teach students to match the quantity to its corresponding fractional number but in this
example there is no reasonable fraction number to match the quantity 70.
One way of solving this problem is to find a quantity to see if it is divisible by 17.
Ola's white mushroom must be multiple of 17.
Ola's number of
mushrooms
17

Ola's number of white

mushrooms
2

Ola's number of brown

mushrooms
15

34

30

51

45

68

Not available

Not available

Ella's number of
mushrooms
70 - 17 = 53 which
is not multiple of 9.
36 is a multiple of
9
19 which is not a
multiple of 9.
Not available

What does it take to be a good math contestant?

In 2015, we taught a grade 2 girl and she impressed us a lot on her ability. She has some abilities which her
peers may not possess. We analyzed her and found she has the following characteristics. She got to 10% in
Canada and also Vancouver Silver medal. We have found many of our students who did well in math
contests have some special characteristics which many other students seem to lack.
1. She has a very good visualization ability. In 2015 Canadian contest she got problem 18 correctly
while many of our same grade students could not get it tight. Some of them could not understand it
even after I explained.
2. Not only she could understand the meaning of word problems, she is able to analyze them. Many
our students could understand the meaning of word problems but lack the ability to analyze them.
3. She could even create word problems. Sometimes, I would use my students names when I created
word problems right in front of them. She saw it and one day she told me that she would like to
create a word problem and below was the word problem she created.

Sample of math, chess, and puzzles integrated worksheet

We have created many math, chess, and puzzles integrated workbooks, this is one way to make students
not feel bored when working on math computation problems. Below is one example.
Ho Math and Chess ( )
1 1 1
, ,
8 4 2

You are at (e, 2) =

3
(a, 3)

(b, 3)

Rule: All the fractions

must appear exactly
once in every row and column. The number appears
in the bottom right-hand corner is the end result
calculated according to arithmetic operator(s) and
(c, 3) chess move(s) as indicated by darker arrow(s).

2
(a, 2)

(c, 2)

1
(a, 1)
d

(b, 1)
e

(c, 1)
f