A West Vancouver student has been getting a firsthand look at how intelligence can come in many shapes and sizes.
Ten-year-old Matthew Yu is one of 10 remaining competitors on Canada’s Smartest Person Junior, a youth-focused version of the popular adult TV show that, in this youthful iteration, is pitting a dozen kids from across the country in competition as they use their smarts, skills and intelligences across six varied categories.
“I just want everyone to know that although all of us kids come from different cities and different provinces, although everyone wants to get first place, everyone is still friends to each other, everyone still supports each other. I think that this is way more important than winning will be,” Yu told the North Shore News.
The six-episode series, which is showing on CBC every Wednesday for the next several weeks, has already seen two youth participants eliminated from the competition following a tense outing in the first episode, which aired last week.
Inspired by the theory of multiple intelligences, which suggests that human intelligence contains multitudes and shouldn’t be judged by merely a single dominant ability, Canada’s Smartest Person Junior challenges the young participants in a plethora of diverse categories, including physical, musical, social, linguistic, logical and visual smarts.
Yu, a Grade 5 student at Collingwood, lists figure skating, piano, debate, swimming and math as his greatest skills and assets to the competition.
“My strengths are musical and logical,” he says, noting his successful showing at last year’s Caribou Mathematics Competition, a worldwide online math contest in which he placed first in B.C. and 14th in the world for his age category. “I really like math because I just think it’s really cool to play around with numbers and doing so much cool stuff with them.”
During last week’s premiere episode Yu excelled during the cake mix challenge, where competitors had to replicate a cake design using their own savvy logistical and visual skills, and during the tower of intelligence challenge.
“What we had to do was we had a rope and there was a platform,” explains Yu. “The rope was attached to the platform and the platform was really unstable, you had to pull the rope to make the platform balanced. You had to move back and forth to put multiple blocks on the platforms – you had to put six blocks, to be exact.”
In a twist on the original grownup version of the show, audiences that tune into Canada’s Smartest Person Junior, which is hosted by actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee from CBC’s Kim's Convenience, will get to see the same cast of youth participants week-to-week.
Competitors with the strongest performances each week will advance to the next episode.
The show was filmed in August in Toronto and although Yu couldn’t reveal what audiences will have in store for them when they tune into future episodes, the young competitor had some sage advice he says he picked up along the way when it comes to one’s intelligence.
“Everyone can be smart in their own way. Smart doesn’t mean just working,” says Yu. “Smart actually means that you can be good at any category. … My advice would be just be yourself.”
Follow Yu’s and other participants’ progress on Canada’s Smartest Person Junior by tuning into the competition every Wednesday at 8 p.m. on CBC or by visiting cbc.ca/watch. The series finale is slated to run Dec. 19.
