He said with effect from 2019, the brain development competition, which was held twice in Accra for inter-school competition in April and national competition in July would now be held only once.

He made this known at the ninth UCMAS National Competition held in Accra at the weekend, where participants were drawn from UCMAS centres and franchises across the country.

Mr Ohemeng said the competition would now fuse the inter-schools competition into the annual national UCMAS competition.

He said the new arrangement would mean that the national competition would be held in April every year and that would also mean attendance would be high to make the competition keenly contested among all schools, franchisee areas and centres nationwide.

He urged partners to ensure that preparation went into the competition to ensure that the 10th UCMAS national competition would become a success.

Mr Ohemeng said the UCMAS programme was not mathematics programme but rather a brain development programme, which help young people to build their brains for effectiveness and smartness.

He said UCMAS goes beyond mathematics adding that “as part of the UCMAS programme, children are able to multi-task and we realise that in this world, if you are not able to multi-task, then it means that you are being left behind”.

He said “in many organisations, when you go for interviews, they want people who are multi-tasking, people who are able to do so many things and that is one thing that UCMAS seeks to focus on.

We try to build the confidence in children and try to help them to also become multi-tasking individuals.We believe that starting multi-tasking and training children at a younger stage is something that is going to help them a lot,” Mr Ohemeng said.

He said the management of the programme has been knocking on the doors of government to ensure that the programme is introduced to government schools but to no avail, because as it is now, the brain development programme is only prevalent in many private schools.

Mr Joseph Kojo Nunoo, the Franchisee Manager at UCMAS Ghana said, the ninth national competition brought together more than 1,300 pupils from UCMAS centres, some selected schools and from 21 franchisee areas, who converged to compete.