PORT ANGELES — A math tutor from Port Angeles is celebrating the release of a low-cost online math tutoring program that he had a hand in creating.
Andrew Martyanov has tutored math students in Clallam County for years, including helping home-school and public school students improve their understand of math, and to improve test scores for college entrance exams.
From algebra to calculus, most students aren’t achieving their potential abilities, Martyanov said.
“The vast majority of kids can be taught and they can be good,” he said.
Martyanov who is a graduate of a naval academy in the former Soviet Union, earned an engineering degree and served in the navy’s coast guard forces for six years during the late 1980s, during the breakup of the Soviet Union.
After leaving the navy in 1991, he moved to the United States to make a new start.
He found he had a passion for teaching the math he had been taught at the naval academy, and made a career of it.
In 2008, he answered an advertisement placed by John Leddo, a psychologist and artificial-intelligence researcher, to design the curriculum for a new individualized style of online tutoring.
Martyanov became a co-owner and partner in the creation of Education Online Learning, known as EOL.
A low-income student who earned a scholarship to a prestigious prep school in New England, Leddo wanted to find a way to offer the kind of learning opportunities he was given to a larger group of lower income students, Leddo said.
Idea sparked in 1980s
Leddo began working on his concept in the late 1980s, but the technology wasn’t ready and in 2001 when the technology was ready there was no funding, he said.
This year the funding and technology finally came together and the website was launched in September.
The learning program, at www. eollearning.com, offers middle and high school students self-paced math tutoring for only $5 a month.
The program begins with a standardized test format similar to the PSAT, SAT and the Washington state end of course math exams required for graduation from high school.
“We know we have to play by the book,” Martyanov said.
At their own pace
If students are able to solve the problem on their first try, they move on.
If the student answers incorrectly instead of simply marking the student wrong, the program guides the student through the process of how to solve that problem, gives helpful hints without giving away the answer and encourages the student to put it down on paper to work through the problem.
The next addition to the site will allow students to input their own homework into the system and get same kind of instructive guidance, Leddo said.
As the site grows, other subjects will be added, he said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@ peninsuladailynews.com.
