On February 1, 2018, DAWN and EDeQUAL hosted a launch session for the Math Challenge 2018 at Karachi School of Business and Leadership (KSBL).

Math Challenge 2018 is a team-based, inter-school, national competition for students studying in grades 7, 8, 9 and 10. The competition will be based on a live game show format using the latest quiz technology systems, and will have students use tablets and computers to solve math problems and work around analytical challenges.

Each round of the challenge will hold a mix of questions, covering a wide range of topics. As many as 7,500 participants from schools all over Pakistan have registered for the competition.

Thursday's session included practice questions, round structures, a general Q&A session, sample quizzes and announcements of important event dates for all participants, from both public and private sector schools.

Math Challenge 2018 intends to test the students' analytical and problem solving skills in three rounds: preliminary, regional and national.

For the preliminary round, there will be pools of eight to nine teams with each team comprising four students. A team will have two students from junior classes and two from senior classes.

For the regional and national rounds, there will be 12 teams of participants that will compete.

Towards the end, Math Challenge 2018 will announce two champions and two runners up in a closing event which will be held at the same venue in Karachi.

Addressing questions on the development of Math Challenge, Ameen Jan, CEO of EDeQUAL Pakistan indicated that the competition does not comprise of questions extracted from any of the curricula that are part of the country's education system. Instead, the competition seeks students who have the "ability to think and turn on their mental bulbs".

EDeQUAL is a Silicon Valley-funded education-technology organisation headquartered in Karachi. It aims to provide high quality instruction in mathematics to students from primary to O levels.

Assessments for the competition are developed via EDeQUAL’s online learning platform.

More details about the competition are available on its official website.