Hello, I am Chua Boon Liang, a seasoned Maths educator in Singapore with over 30 years of teaching experience. In the first 10 years, I taught Mathematics and headed the department in two secondary schools in Singapore. Then, from being a schoolteacher and head of department, I moved on to become a teacher educator at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU). I conducted courses on Maths education to schoolteachers, school leaders, as well as policymakers, both from Singapore, as well as overseas countries. So, ask me anything about these series of books!

What are some key features of the MCE Cambridge IGCSE™ Mathematics series?

The MCE Cambridge IGCSE™ series has many amazing features. Let me showcase 3 of them.

The first, ‘Pause and Discover’ in the Student Book. Now, each chapter contains at least one ‘Pause and Discover’ activity. We adopted an inquiry-based learning approach to help students understand concepts and procedures. At the end of the activity, the key results emerging from the activity are listed out clearly so that students know what are the key ideas to take away from the learning activity.

Next , ‘Practice Questions’. Practice is an important aspect of learning mathematics to help the students reinforce the concepts and skills that they learned in the classroom and to assess their own learning.

The third feature is ‘Fun with Maths’. Each chapter in the Workbook ends with ‘Fun with Maths’. A non-routine problem, puzzle, game, or interactive ICT-based activity is provided to encourage students to collaborate or work independently to extend their own learning.

What does this series have that other maths series might not?

I’d like to highlight two of the important features that we have, and I believe most textbooks do not have.

What is unique in this series is this feature called ‘Pause and Try’.

We provide practice questions parallel to the worked examples to help students reinforce the skills that they learn through the worked examples. For every worked example, we also indicate the main task objective to draw students’ attention to the targeted skill so that they know what exactly the worked example wants them to learn and take away.

For the ‘Chapter Opener’, each chapter begins with an interesting historical snippet related to the content, a puzzle, or a real-world problem to connect the mathematics that we want the students to learn in the chapter to the real world. This opener provides motivation for the students to learn the topic and to pique their interest. We want them to appreciate the power and usefulness of mathematics in real-life contexts and also to see the relevance in their daily lives.

At the end of learning the topic, we invite students to revisit the task described in the chapter opener.

What was your inspiration when you co-authored this series?

I want the series to be the go-to resource for both students and teachers, something that they can rely on whenever they are in doubt. I also want it to be something that our children, our grandchildren, will still find valuable in many years to come. I asked myself this question, what are some of the features in the textbooks that I have, those that I used when I was a secondary school student, those that I used when I was a schoolteacher. I looked through them and I asked myself, what are the features that are meaningful to me, that are valuable to me, that I still want to have in my series. I pinpointed them down to three things.

First, clear explanation of concepts and descriptions of procedures. Second, meaningful and purposeful learning activities. Thirdly, the description must be easy for the students to read and to follow. So, these are the three things that I think are valuable when we conceptualised this book.

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Find out more about this series: MCE Cambridge IGCSE™ Mathematics.