In the summer of 2025, the UAE Ministry of Education asked the team behind the Math Olympiad Trainer Academy to design and deliver an intensive, onsite training camp for the country's IMO team and its strongest secondary school mathematicians. Nineteen days later, seventeen students had lived through it.
This page documents a single sovereign level engagement for the UAE's IMO team and advanced secondary school mathematicians. The network behind the Academy established the camp and carried its lessons into later work. The Academy's standing program continues to serve mathematics teachers.
The request came directly from the UAE Ministry of Education. The Ministry's Innovation & Entrepreneurship Department, which led the engagement on the government side, framed Olympiad training as a strategic investment in the nation's intellectual infrastructure, the same advanced reasoning that underwrites a competitive innovation economy. The Academy accepted the brief and built the camp around its own academic team, in collaboration with the Ministry. The Ministry's video below offers a look inside the camp, with students and instructors sharing their experience.
The teaching team was deliberately built around three complementary profiles. A theoretician developed the theory, a practitioner focused on competition strategy, and a recent competitor helped students connect the two.
University professor and PhD candidate; author of a published book on inequalities. Carried the formal pedagogical structure of the program, the depth that turns a clever trick into a durable method.
IMO bronze medalist and current coach for the Saudi national team. He brought proven competition strategy and disciplined time management into daily practice.
Recent elite competitor and current university student. Worked closely with participants on the inequalities module and translated advanced concepts into the language of someone who had been on the same side of the desk months earlier.
The curriculum covered the four areas that make up an olympiad. Each block ran as a focused module with daily problem sets, classroom proof construction, and mock competition rounds against the clock.
Fourteen days of onsite training at NYUAD were followed by five days of virtual instruction from 5 to 9 July, so that the students preparing for the IMO could continue refining selected topics after the residential phase ended. Students lived in NYUAD dormitories, ate in campus dining halls, and worked through problems together late into the evening. For many of them, it was a first taste of university life, an experience that, on its own terms, mattered as much as the mathematics.
Assessment ran continuously: daily problem sets, mock competitions, extended homework, and trainer observations. Students from public, private, and vocational schools across the Emirates worked side by side. Peer mentoring between the IMO team and the broader cohort emerged naturally and was one of the program's quiet successes.
Olympiad mathematics develops thoughtful problem solvers and helps shape future scientists, innovators, and leaders for a knowledge driven world. Sustained support makes that growth possible.Closing message by Dr. Dania Zantout · 9 July 2025
A small selection of images taken by Ministry representatives during the residential phase at NYU Abu Dhabi.
The 2025 training camp ran as a sovereign engagement with the Ministry of Education. It ran alongside the Academy's first cycle that summer. Insights moved between the two efforts and helped shape the Academy's current practice.
Working with Mr. Mustafa Alelg in the residential camp opened a concrete pathway for the Academy's own participants. A secondary school teacher who is part of the Math Olympiad Trainer Academy was able to observe and practice elite Olympiad delivery in the same room as an internationally established coach, exactly the kind of apprenticeship the Academy was built to provide. Mr. Mustafa has since continued his association with the Academy as a coach in its later cycles.
That is the deeper logic behind training teachers. A single room of seventeen students is a beautiful thing. A room of trained teachers, each carrying what they learned back into their own classrooms, multiplies it.
The 2025 training camp was a moment. The Math Olympiad Trainer Academy is the long work, training the teachers who carry mathematical thinking into classrooms across the region, year after year.