Registration opens every beginning of the year. Two hundred places are available for second and third year high school students at public schools in the Campinas region. In “Mathematics Month”, registrants receive a general review of Elementary Education content. After that, students take a test and are selected to occupy one of the hundred places on the Exact course. Throughout the year they will take classes, free of charge, in Portuguese, mathematics, physics and chemistry at night, in a Basic Cycle room at Unicamp. In August 2018 it will have been like this for ten years.
When the project began, Monique Oliveira was an undergraduate. Today she is pursuing a doctorate at the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering (Feagri). From monitor (and teacher) she became coordinator. “The volunteers are undergraduate and postgraduate students at Unicamp. We have advisors for each area, who are professors at the University, and also a advisor to help with the transition of the organization's teams,” she explains. Over the course of a decade, 360 volunteers and 15 teachers have participated in the project.
According to Monique, this is not a pre-university course. “We realized we couldn’t promise that. Our focus has always been on students developing study autonomy.” The course structure Exact It consists of a theoretical class in the first period and activities with exercises in the second period. “We have exercise teachers and monitors. We start from the premise that students will not have much time to study outside of Exato, because many are working or already studying for school.”
Since 2008, the project has been supported by Unicamp through the Dean of Extension and Culture (Proec). “In these 10 years, Exato has changed the way classes are taught. We reduced the content and divided it into expository and exploratory classes. We also structured organization and IT sections, which give us support for the teaching sections”, says professor Matheus Souza from the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC), advisor in the mathematics area. Souza, while a student at Unicamp, was also a volunteer teacher at Exato.
One of the signs that the course is reaching maturity, according to the professor, is the fact that the areas have already started to prepare their own teaching material. This means that the best pedagogical practices are being consolidated. “Students have some gaps in basic education and volunteers generally come from another perspective, they have no teaching experience. Therefore, the potential of both is exercised to the extreme. The role of advisors is important to help make the content more enjoyable and the teaching and learning experiences more fluid”, he added.
Renata de Santana Lourenço, student of the speech therapy course at Unicamp, also a volunteer on the project, was a student at Exato in 2015. Then, based on her Enem score, she got a place at Profis and, this year, entered college. “A lot of the things I saw at Profis I already knew from my time at Exato. My school was very outdated in exact sciences, especially, I had a lot of difficulty, there was a lot of content that I had never seen.”
For Renata, in these ten years of Exato it is also necessary to celebrate the opportunity that the course offers for public school students to get to know Unicamp from the inside and know that it is possible to study at the University.
