Schools are partnering with mobile-phone companies to help kids conquer math. Are smartphone-learning initiatives more than a corporate gimmick?

In middle school, math was Taylor Scott's worst subject by far. "I honestly hated it," says Scott, now a 15-year-old sophomore at Southwest High School in Jacksonville, North Carolina. She'd take notes as the teacher droned on, but she never really wrestled to understand the concepts until she was home alone with her textbook -- and sometimes not even then. Most of the time, her math grades hovered in the B to C range.

So when Scott learned last year that she and her classmates would be participating in Project K-Nect, a Qualcomm-funded initiative to distribute cell phones for math instruction, she was all for it. Why not? It wasn't as if math class could get any worse, and new toys are always fun to play with.

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