Innovation is the operative word these days within the teaching community. Teachers are called on to come up with fresh ideas and to explore unorthodox strategies to make learning both an exciting and enriching exercise.
Laurie Butgereit, a computer programmer, is among those who are pushing the envelope of creativity. She is part of a project called Math on MXit, currently hosted by the Meraka Institute, a division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
The project ‘is designed to give high school students quick and easy access to a tutor to help with questions in mathematics,” says Butgereit.
It has been an instant hit with learners, mainly because it is cheap and uses a cellphone as a communication tool. Where an SMS would cost 50c or more, messages sent via MXit cost as little as one or two cents.
Butgereit says Math on MXit latched on to the fact that virtually every teenager owns a cellphone as a ‘medium of communication”. She says learners who want to interact with a maths tutor can simply ‘download MXit software via WAP, which runs on all modern cellphones, and then register it with MXit”. MXit is an instant messaging system that runs on cellphones, and is a registered trademark of MXit Lifestyle.
Once this is done, learners are able to ask tutors maths questions. ‘These questions are routed to a tutor who is online during specific hours to help provide answers,” says Butgereit.
The service was available for only three hours a week but, because of its growing popularity, it is now increased to eight hours a week after school. But the tutor does not do homework, says Butgereit. The tutor only ‘guides the learner into working out the problems”.
To avoid abuse of the system by social misfits who could use the facility to lure and molest children, Math on Mxit has introduced some safety features.
These include asking learners to use fictitious names when they register and barring tutors from making contact with participants outside of the project’s scope. Tutors’ names, gender, race and age are also concealed — they are simply called dr. math.
The participants are, however, required to give their cellphone numbers so that ‘when a learner asks a question he or she can be identified by that number”, but more importantly, to ‘ensure the response goes back to the correct cellphone”.
Butgereit said conversations are recorded or logged for ‘quality and research purposes”.
She said close monitoring of conversations is maintained to ensure tutors are not making unacceptable advances on children and that minors do not make wild or baseless allegations against the tutors.
Because learners feel secure with the system, some also use it to ask for counselling. Even when they are referred to specific organisations that could provide professional help, they are reluctant to interact with these structures.
Some learners use the system as a platform for social interaction. ‘A social atmosphere develops between the learners and the tutor. Learners would virtually ‘pop in’ when school was out just to chat,” says Butgereit.
MXit is confined to some parts of the North West province, having been conceived in partnership with Hartbeespoortdam High School, but plans are afoot to expand it around the country.
Snippet from MXit
Learner asking a math-related question:
(14:30:32) unknown-9: hw do u work out the area of a circle
(14:30:36) dr. math: Hi, do you have the radius of the circle?
(14:32:06) dr. math: If you have the radius of the circle, then the area is pi times radius squared
(14:32:08) unknown-9: 8mm
(14:32:41) dr. math: so pi x 8 x 8 the result will be in mm squared.
(14:43:12) unknown-9: okay thanks.