Enhancing Skills and Strategies for Math Olympiad Coaches Worldwide
This summer, 27 Olympiad coaches from 14 countries successfully completed the second season of the Global Talent Fund's Excellence in Coaching and Leadership (EXCL) Program. The EXCL Program, led by Vladimir Bragin and José Esparza-Lozano, is an eight-week online initiative dedicated to training coaches in Olympiad mathematics. The focus of this season was on combinatorial problem-solving strategies, a key area of preparation for the upcoming International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) 2024, which will be held in Bath, United Kingdom.
The program, which ran from May 11 to July 7, 2024, included eight weekly online sessions, each lasting two hours, supplemented by four comprehensive problem sets. Coaches participated in weekly virtual meetings, office hours, and discussions via a chat forum. The curriculum covered a range of advanced topics, including graph theory, extremal principles, probabilistic methods, invariants, and generating functions. Among the highlights was a guest lecture by Aladin Sabbagh from Tunisia, who runs the popular Math Olympiad YouTube channel, Math Wisdom (@MathWisdom42).
To recognize the achievements of participants, the Global Talent Fund awarded Certificates of Completion to those who attended the sessions and successfully completed the assignments. Additionally, Certificates of Excellence were awarded to the top five participants, based on their performance in the four homework assignments. The recipients of the Certificates of Excellence were:
- Husam Abdelhady Zaid from Egypt
- Oscar Alonso Zamora Luna from Costa Rica
- Evariste Kisimbanyi Migabo from the Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Jakhongir Norboev from Uzbekistan
- Lisandro Enmanuel Romero Landaverry from Nicaragua
Of the 27 participants who completed this season, 15 had previously participated in the first season of the EXCL Program. Season 1, which ran from October 21, 2023, to February 17, 2024, provided a comprehensive 10-week training in Olympiad problem-solving, covering topics in algebra, combinatorics, number theory, and geometry. The season also included leadership and program organization training, addressing pedagogy, community building, and program financing. Participants benefited from insights shared by guest speakers, including IMO medalists, program managers from successful countries, and educational innovators from Japan, Taiwan, Tunisia, South Africa, and the USA.
Looking ahead, the Global Talent Fund will launch Season 3 of the EXCL Program from October to December 2024, with a focus on Olympiad number theory. For more information, please contact José Esparza-Lozano at esparza@globtalent.org.
