Col. Trippi, who lives in Alexandria, is the coordinator of a team that is designing a math syllabus for high school algebra students that shows how math gets used in real life. It includes math problems that a fictional pizza parlor and shoe manufacturer would confront. It also includes real life examples from Nabisco, United Airlines, and McDonald's. Among his partners are a group of educators from the Fairfax County Public School System, including Thomas Nuttall and Susan Spage, who developed parts of the program and tested them in local classes.
Col. Trippi is chairman of the public awareness committee of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The Teacher Instructional Modules Project is a program of INFORMS and Wayne State University in Michigan that was funded by a grant from the National Security Agency. The team is currently shipping the first portion of the syllabus to 2,500 high school mathematics teachers across the country.
Col. Trippi's interest in teaching math to young people has a personal side. He remembers observing that the school system never encouraged his son, now an arts administrator, to explore one of his talents, an aptitude in math. "No one motivated my son when he was in high school to take math courses or study science and engineering," he says. "I regret that. He was a natural." Young people today, he says, need to realize that math can be fun - and that it can provide the foundation for future careers in business, government, and education.
For the last ten years, Col. Trippi has been broadcasting this message through INFORMS and one of its predecessors, the Operations Research Society of America. Col. Trippi has spearheaded a series of projects that produced instructional videos and classroom materials for middle and high school students. Col. Trippi is available for interview.
The project was coordinated by Col. Trippi and prepared by Dr. Kenneth Chelst and Dr. Thomas Edwards, both professors at Wayne State University in Detroit. The program is a project of INFORMS and Wayne State University that was funded by a grant from the National Security Agency. Teachers in southeastern Michigan also helped develop the program. The modules can be accessed on the Internet at http://mie.eng.wayne.edu/faculty/chelst/informs. Teachers can request copies by phoning Col. Frank Trippi at (703) 922-6775 or calling toll-free at (800) 4INFORMs.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.