Chairman Chika Yamauchi

There are many classes and lessons for children offered for extracurricular activities. However, what are the skills that you really want your children to acquire, when you look towards the future, perhaps in 2030 or 2045, when your children are grown and have become adults?

When I reflect on myself, I wish I had learned how to speak English and calculate using abacus. If I could of understood English as much as I did in Japanese, I would of been able to expand my perspectives and enjoyed a lot more, experiencing a broader world. I also think it would of been convenient if I had a high level mental calculation skills. Having at least the basic skills of mental calculation like the arithmetic operations, they can be applied to a variety of things through further training.

I started an abacus school thinking that the mental calculation skills that do not rely on information technology would create significant value in the IT oriented society. However, I did not have the skills myself, and I could not teach the children easily. That is how I thought of developing the Tablet-based learning app, “SoroTouch”. More than 400 students, parents, and the school staff participated in the daily trial and error that were repeated in the development of “SoroTouch”. All the efforts were done from the viewpoint of mothers wanting to develop their children’s mental calculation ability. There were new discoveries every day, and I was amazed by the potential of the children and the possibilities of the people.

Like learning a foreign language, I consider mental calculation to be a skill, not an objective. We are improving the learning program constantly with “speedy and efficient learning” as the crucial key. We believe if you learn efficiently and quickly at the right age, the mental calculation skills can be utilized in many places, and the scope of utilization will be broadened through many new experiences.