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Email pairs math students with corporate professionals

By Steve Enders

If kids might be using math in the real world someday, then why not pair them up now with people that are using similar problem-solving skills to help their industries become some of the most succesful in the world?

That's exactly what Columbia Middle School teacher Kelly Vaughn did with her eighth-graders.

This year, she started a program for her three classes called "Math Mentors." She used the Internet and email to pair students with professionals from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, giving them problems to solve using the help of their professional mentors.

Vaughn's students celebrated the completion of their problems Friday at Intel, where they met with their mentors and took a tour of the company's Santa Clara headquarters.

The idea came to Vaughn while working at Intel in a summertime internship-type program that's run by an industrial science and math organization.

"Using math concepts, we exchange solutions and explanations of math by solving problems," she said.

Her three classes were divided among three different organizations that provided mentors to the students. The mentors came from Santa Clara University's Chicano engineering society, AMD and Intel.

Vaughn gave the students about three math problems to work on with the mentors, and used computer lab time--one period on Tuesdays--to use electronic mail to communicate with the mentors.

"It was hard," Vaughn said of the limited computer time. "Students were patient and worked in teams. They had to take turns to make sure their emails went through."

Another problem the kids ran into was an unreliable computer network at their school. Last Tuesday, they couldn't even get into the lab during their assigned time.

But glitches aside, the program appears to have been a success.

"It's ideal over email. We had more mentors than students. The employees [at AMD and Intel] wished they had other students to work with," Vaughn said. "It's an ideal volunteer opportunity. They don't have to leave their offices.

"What makes it challenging is, how do you communicate with someone you've never seen before? You can only use words," she said, describing the process the students must go through to explain how they came to a particular solution to a problem.

In an auditorium at Intel on Friday morning, Maryanne Keehn moderated a discussion between mentors and students, who were meeting face-to-face for the first time.

The hour-long discussion was productive, as each group shared what they thought were the good and bad points of the program.

Some of the students said they liked getting the help on the tough math problems, working with the mentors and using the computers. One complaint, though, was that the email was a little too impersonal.

One Intel employee said, "Maybe the emailing is intriguing, but had we had an initial meeting, maybe there would be other communication with the mentors."

Keehn said that she was concerned about the "appropriateness" of communicating with the kids.

"We asked the mentors not to get too personal with the kids until later, for the protection of the kids," she said.

Student Matt Wyczalek and his mentor, engineer Jacques Vuye, ate lunch together and said that they both liked the program very much.

"It's cool," Wyczalek said. "We get to talk about the problem, but it would have been interesting to meet him first."

Vuye agreed. "I understand because society isn't 100 percent computerized. There's something to be said for personal contact," he said. "It's clearly an opportunity to efficiently use my time to be a volunteer. This is a positive thing that I will continue."

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, April 1, 1998.
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