The local after-school program Buddies4Math has run since 2010 with one mission — to make math fun, according to their website. Originally launched in Mountain View, the organization is built on high school volunteer tutors who are paired with elementary school students in weekly tutoring sessions.

Buddies4Math’s main team is entirely student run, ranging from the executive directors — Gunn High senior Samhita Gadiraju, Gunn High senior Samhita Laxman and Los Altos High senior Nora Saraci-Alonso — to the directors in charge of each elementary school to help organize tutoring. These tutoring sessions help younger students with fewer academic resources feel more confident and develop a strong foundation in their math skills.

“The students who attend Buddies4Math tend to be ones who are also struggling with math in their classrooms and who don’t have a support system to get outside tutors in math,” Laxman said.

The organization collaborates with the Mountain View Beyond the Bell afterschool program to follow a rotation of four elementary schools, meeting weekly on Friday to tutor kids after school in their classrooms. There is one hour-long session dedicated to teaching first-, second- and third-grade students alongside another hour-long session dedicated to teaching fourth and fifth grade students, where volunteers build connections and tutor students.

On top of building a connection with students in tutoring sessions, volunteers also incorporate different interactive math games to make the learning process more engaging for students. These activities range from math Jenga, where Jenga blocks have basic problems for students to solve, to team-building games, like an arithmetic game involving students saying their answer in sync with one another.

“The main goal [of Buddies4Math] is to make math seem fun and intuitive,” Saraci-Alonso said. “Sometimes we’ll see students with a negative attitude and mindset towards math, but our goal is to change that and make sure that they approach math in a more positive manner.”

So far, Saraci-Alonso said the change has been clear. Not only have students grown significantly throughout the tutoring process, but volunteers have also been able to build rapport with the students they help.

According to Laxman, another impact Buddies4Math has is that it gives opportunities for high school students to be more involved and make connections within their community as volunteers.

“One of the biggest things that we train our tutors to do is to really work on building connections with these kids,” Laxman said. “We’re not here to just teach them and then leave after two hours.”

In the future, Buddies4Math hopes to expand, with goals of recruiting more student volunteers and spreading the word about their organization to help young students with math, according to Laxman.

“A lot of these students have the same amount of potential as students anywhere else, and we just want to give them that step up, because we really do think that they are going to do great things,” Saraci-Alonso said.

For more information about Buddies4Math and becoming a volunteer, visit https://buddies4math.org/.