The Academic Excellence Workship demonstrates that achievement of underrepresented minority students in mathematics and subsequent persistence in SME majors may be associated less with precollege ability than with in‐college academic experiences and expectations.

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Working on the perfect–triangle problem was a real mountaintop experience in mathematics. Our problem–solving path started with basic geometry, followed by a little algebra, then more geometry and more algebra. Our tour was enhanced by using a computer not to solve the problem but to explore its solution.

The geoboard has long been a useful tool for mathematics students of all ages to explore geometric patterns and relationships. Among the many interesting activities that can be done on geoboards is exploring properties of polygons, such as the relationship between a polygon's number of sides and the sum of its interior angles. Such software programs as The Geometer's Sketchpad (Jackiw 1990) can also be helpful in exploring these and even more sophisticated geometric relationships. These tools can be helpful not only in discovering known relationships but also in making new conjectures on the basis of observations and experimentations (NCTM 1991).