A comparison of three architectures supporting mobile text-based mathematics tutoring

The annual South African National Senior Certficate (NSC) results indicate that there is room for research in assisting pupils with the subject of Mathematics and Mathematical Literacy and, indeed, there have been many research projects attempting to give such assistance. One type of project which has appeared in a number of configurations is linking pupils with volunteer tutors for text based assistance with their homework. This paper looks at three such projects - Dr Math, Prof π and Prof. Each of these three projects gave or gives school pupils text based assistance with their mathematics homework by linking them with volunteer tutors from local universities. Each of these three projects only supported text based messages between pupils and tutors in order to conserve bandwidth. Each of these three projects, however, had dramatically different internal architectures. This paper describes the three different architectures clearly showing the advantages and disadvantages of each architecture. It is important to note that this paper is not about the success or failure of the actual tutoring research projects. This paper is a comparison of the underlying architectures.