QIU Chengtong: Change the pattern of preparing for exams and cultivate an imaginative generation
"We don't study for exams. We have to learn all kinds of tools. We have to increase our curiosity and interest in learning."On December 3, the final round of the 2023 Qiu Chengtong Middle School Science Prize was held at Tsinghua University. Qiu Chengtong, the president of the competition and a lecturer at Tsinghua University, stood among middle school students with a bright smile and appealed to appeal to them.
Speaking about his two sons' participation in the Intel Genius Competition, Qiu clearly remembers the growth of children who became more interested in science and decided to choose scientific research as their lifelong career.
Looking back on the past 16 years, Qiu Cheng-tung has made great strides in the level of Chinese students."When we first held a math competition in China, basically our middle school students didn't know much about calculus.Today, not only do our classmates know calculus, but calculus and even higher mathematics have become a very simple tool for them to use freely.Some articles can be published in quite good magazines, and our progress has been able to keep up with the world's most advanced level.”
Qiu believes that "idols" have great power.
Qiu Chengtung, a middle school student, was inspired to read "Forty Years of Mathematics" written by Chen Shao-shen and aspired to become a world-class scholar.Many well-known mathematicians are also deeply influenced by the "idol", Euler was thirteen or four years old, by the influence of Bernoulli father and son into the mathematical research path.Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, who was in the countryside when he was a child, did not listen to Einstein's lectures, but read a lot of Einstein's autobiography and lectures, so he chose to study physics.
For this reason, over the years, Chiu Cheng-tung High School Science Awards Association has invited many top scholars to participate in the judging, including Nobel, Fields and Turing Award winners.This year, nearly 40 well-known scientists from home and abroad, including Huang Naizheng, Tang Benzhong, Hu Shimin, Shao Feng and Ralph Martin, members of the Welsh Academy of Sciences, served as judges.
The judges invited to the Qiu Chengtung High School Science Award were not only involved in a simple evaluation, but also in giving feedback to children's love, giving advice to students' initial thoughts, and drawing ambitious goals for young scholars.
High school students were inspired by the short conversations and conversations with top scholars.Wu Keyue, from the Shanghai Civil Peace School, won the gold prize for computer science. She proposed a new statistical machine learning model for word representation to deal with the complex nature of English, which is usually composed of subword elements.She said the questions extended her understanding of the subject and received encouraging suggestions, such as using ChatGPT as a tool for analysis and comparison.
The great mathematician Cantor once said that in mathematics, the art of asking questions is more important than the art of solving them.Communicate with the Master to inspire students to ask questions.
Ralph Martin, a professor at Cardiff University and a member of the Welsh Academy of Sciences, said good problems are usually not planned, but should have a wide range of implications, connections to reality and be solvable.Scientific research is not just boring, but also communicating with people, showing results, oral defense, and listening to feedback.
Professor Chow King-liu of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology encourages people to observe and ask questions.For example, how do these things happen?What is the mechanism behind this?Sometimes, he says, students have too many questions, teachers may be impatient, it's okay, asking questions is the right way and direction.Instead of chasing technology too much, he suggests, focus on the problem itself.Only by paying attention to the problem itself can we enter the stage of solving the problem with new technology.
"After communicating with a master and setting ambitious goals, we must learn from the ground up and master as many basic tools as possible." said Qiu Cheng-tung.
Middle school to cultivate interest, the university to lay a good foundation, contact with various disciplines, get full development; become a graduate student and make a real first-class research.This is Qiu Chengtung's idea of training excellent mathematicians, and the whole process is the basic process of training an excellent mathematician.
In this year's event, Asian athletes from Singapore, Thailand and India showed great creativity and imagination.It also makes him think further about China's basic education.
He called for a quick change in the way China's basic education prepares for exams, instead focusing on protecting children's interests and curiosity, so that the next generation can be full of creativity." As a result of the brushwork training, the teacher's ideas are all reflected in the students, but the students can't have other ideas, to stimulate curiosity and creativity, and at the same time, creative ideas and training tools should be combined.”
Qiu believes that in basic science, China's development over the past decade is unimaginable. The level of outstanding college students is close to the world's first-class, but not enough for graduate students.He hopes that the competition will be combined with university education to reserve the next generation of Chinese scientific talents and become the backbone of China's construction of first-class research institutes.Students should also see the progress of Chinese universities and choose to stay at home to complete their studies.
"We expect to be able to do world-class learning in China, and we are confident that we can accomplish it." said Qiu Cheng-tung.