By the Numbers

The television setting is "Scoops' Place," a rundown drugstore in the inner city. A young soda jerk named K.O.K. spoons out free banana splits to two buddies who stroll in. Boss "Scoops" calls the boy aside and points out that, although he makes only $1 per hour, K.O.K. has just spent $6 on ice cream for his friends. "Son," says Scoops in a fatherly fashion, "you're supposed to make $4 today. Now you've gotta work two more hours just to get back to zero." Blurts out the incredulous K.O.K.: "Oh, man, hey, I didn't even know there was a below zero. Man, I'm in worse shape than if I didn't have nothin' at all."

K.O.K. has just learned about negative numbers. His experience is shared by elementary school children who--three times a week in Boston and four in Los Angeles--watch a new show, Infinity Factory, on their TV sets. Each half-hour program has a specific goal: to teach youngsters a mathematical concept, holding their attention with lively gimmicks that are reminiscent of those on Laugh-In and Sesame Street.

Fear of Math. Factory is the idea of Jerrold Zacharias, professor emeritus of physics at M.I.T. and the inventor of civilization's most precise timepiece: the atomic clock. Zacharias has long been concerned about what he calls "mathophobia," a widespread fear of math among school children, especially minority students. Black children, according to a 1975 report by the Education Commission of the States, score 14% below the national norm on math tests at age 9, 21% below by age 17.

Determined to make math less formidable, Zacharias in 1974 assembled a team of educators at the Educational Development Center in Newton, Mass. With the help of a $4 million grant from the U.S. Office of Education, the group created a series of 65 TV programs aimed at eight- to eleven-year-olds--the age at which interest in math first begins to wane. Zacharias and his co-workers isolated five mathematical concepts rarely mastered by that age group: map making and scaling, estimating, measurement, decimals and graphs. Then the team planned Factory episodes that focus on each of these problem areas.

The show, produced by Film Maker Jesus Salvadore Trevino, tears along at a breakneck pace to the beat of finger-snapping rock music. Regular features include a spin-off of the Laugh-In cocktail party. Kids dance frantically to music; when it stops, everybody freezes while the camera zooms in on one child, who asks: "What's eight times seven?" The music resumes, then stops, and another child shouts "Fifty-six." In "The Brownstones," another Laugh-In-like skit, children lean out of apartment-house windows singing and joking.

Other episodes take place, as on Sesame Street, in neighborhood settings. Because black and Hispanic children are a special concern, many of the shows are filmed in black areas or in the barrio. For example, at "Julio's Panaderia," a bakery in East Los Angeles, a Chicano family solves everyday problems with math. Coolidge Cool Breeze, a disc jockey on Factory, is a character designed to appeal to blacks. Dialing a number, Cool Breeze croons: "Might this be the home of Olive Crabtree? Can you tell me for one hundred big smackers what the answer is to eight times nine?" Olive is stumped. Viewers, however, are let in on the correct answer.

Infinity Factory will soon have a larger audience. The U.S. Office of Education has already awarded the Educational Development Center another $2 million to produce 30 more shows. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) plans to distribute Factory nationwide in the fall. Insists Davis Tracy, a PBS program coordinator: "This show is gonna click. I mean really click. There isn't anything else like it anywhere."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.