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Home > Employment > Working at MITRE > Community Involvement > | ||||||||||||||||
| Math Clubs + MITRE Employees = School Success June 2006
For Jim Dunyak, a principal signal processing engineer, the hardest part of running a math club at his son's school was keeping up with the kids' improving skills. "They just kept getting faster and faster at solving problems," he says. In 2004, Dunyak volunteered to start a combination of an elementary school math club and Math Olympiad Team in his son's school in Lexington, Mass. He wanted to encourage the school's third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students to view math as something enjoyable—a skill to be mastered, such as music or a sport. Dunyak planned the club's activities around materials from the Mathematical Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools (MOEMS) organization, a non-profit group that offers a set of five math contests each year to students around the world, most of whom meet in groups coached by parents or teachers. Students can attend weekly club meetings, enter the contests, or both. Dunyak says, "I try not to pressure any of the kids to enter the contests, though of course it's great when they do." After organizing club logistics and preparing problem sets for the students, Dunyak found the entire process to be much easier than expected. He estimates that after the first month, he spent a total of about two hours a week on club and team business, including running the actual meetings. "I think I do one thing a little differently from other club coaches," he says. "I noticed that the problems used in the contests are somewhat random in terms of the skills they teach, so I used the MOEMS book to create topic-centered problem sheets for the kids to work on each week. I talk at the beginning of the hour about that particular area of mathematics, and then have the students work on the questions." Dunyak also created math games such as the Mathtona 500 (a board game where teams move ahead by solving problems) and Hangmath, a math variation on the word game Hangman. Although success in the Math Olympiad contests wasn't the central goal behind the club's creation, MOEMS informed Dunyak in May 2005 that one of the school's team's students received the highest score of any student on a school-based team in Lexington, 24 out of a possible 25. Getting a "one less than perfect" score was a feat attained by only 388 students out of the 104,000 who took the test last year—not bad for a rookie team. "The kids seem to like it, and I know I do," Dunyak adds. "This year will be my last one—my son is a fifth grader and will be moving on to middle school. Fortunately, I was able to recruit another parent—Julie DelVecchio Savage, who also works at MITRE—to keep this going. It's a nice way to use our work experience to help our kids and other students." DelVecchio Savage, executive director for Air Force battle management systems, not only joined the math club as a coach but even started a "training camp" for younger "mathletes." She notes that the Math Olympiad contests are really aimed at fourth graders and up. "I wanted to help the third graders, including my own daughter, get up to speed on fundamentals before they start participating in the contests," she says. "The contests can be a little daunting for the younger ones, because many of them are just learning multiplication and division. So I run a basic skills group alongside Jim's group, which tends to attract the older kids. It's been a great experience—the kids really love to learn." Spreading the Word to Other Schools The success of the math club prompted at least one other MITRE employee to volunteer his time to coach a similar group. Jerry Shapiro, also a principal signal processing engineer, for example, coached the math club at his younger daughter's school in Belmont, Mass., last year. "I'd been talking to Jim, and it sounded like a great experience," says Shapiro, whose club attracted a regular crowd of third and fourth graders throughout the school year. "I made it clear that this was designed to be fun, not a class," says Shapiro. Using a combination of Dunyak's topic-based problem sets, practice exams, and math games such as the traditional Chinese game of Nim, Shapiro helped his club participants get ready for the MOEMS contests. "At the beginning of the year, the kids took a pretty long time to complete their problem sets. By the end, I could hardly make it through the first half of the class without running out of problems. Their skills really improved," he says.
Page last updated: June 23, 2006 | Top of page |
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