(FORTUNE Magazine) – AS THE WORLD of work turns ever faster on its computer-imaged, digitally controlled, microprocessed axis, companies increasingly need a numerate and technophilic work force. What they face is this: According to a 1988 study by the Educational Testing Service, 58% of American 13-year-olds cannot solve simple scientific problems, like predicting which way a plant will bend when exposed to light; 62% spend less than one hour a week on math homework. The National Science Foundation estimates that the U.S. will suffer a shortage of 700,000 scientists by the year 2010. Fortunately corporate managers are not just gnashing their molars into enamel dust over the problem. Companies are spending time and money to take science out of the textbook and make it exciting. Students are learning in portable planetariums and traveling via satellite on undersea expeditions. They are programming robots and measuring the speed of sound. Companies are helping teachers who never received science training overcome their fear of the subject. And while some corporations can afford to spend millions of dollars a year on programs, companies with small budgets can help too; most educators and corporate givers say human-to-human help -- the inspiration of working with a company's scientists or mathematicians -- is the biggest gift. Until about ten years ago, many corporations thought that education before college was solely the preserve of local government. That notion has gone the way of the slide rule. GE, a longstanding supporter of science and engineering in universities, decided in 1980 that too many children were lost early on and changed its emphasis to primary and secondary schools. The company recently launched a $20 million program to help inner-city schools get more students on the track to college. Much of GE's work will focus on math and science. GE's rosiest success story has unfolded in the Spanish Harlem district of Manhattan. The old Benjamin Franklin High School used to be one of the worst in the city, a drug hell from which only 7% of the kids who entered graduated. Then, in the fall of 1982, with GE's help, it reopened as the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. GE developed some of the curriculum and set up a CAD/CAM lab. It created the GE Scholars program, picking the top 20 or 30 juniors for special courses and assigning each one a mentor from the company. GE brought in an SAT prep course that raised the school's average scores 170 points. Children from around the city, nearly all of them minorities, compete for admission now. Most of those who make it -- 96% of the seniors -- go on to college. Motivational programs for students, their families, and teachers are crucial, the company finds. Phyllis McGrath, manager of GE's precollege programs, says, ''With a poor family, when they hear about how much college costs, it's not even a subject for the dinner table.'' To counter that thinking, GE set up a program in one of the poorest parts of Alabama for students to visit the campus of nearby Tuskegee Institute and attend Saturday sessions there. The point: to help make them comfortable with the idea of going to college. Last year the first two students in GE's group matriculated at Tuskegee. With a 1990 research and development budget of $855 million, Merck & Co. lives and dies on the strength of its scientists. Robin Hogen, executive vice president of the Merck Co. Foundation, says that good teachers are the key to keeping the company deep in talent. He says: ''We ask all our new recruits why they are a scientist and not a bricklayer or a lawyer. Almost invariably they point to a specific teacher at an early age who turned them on to science.'' To develop more of these paragons, Merck sends New Jersey teachers to local universities for refresher courses, often the first casualty when school budgets are cut. The company also donates lab equipment to schools. And Merck scientists volunteer as pen pals for students, giving the youngsters new ideas for experiments. Hogen says: ''What's been missing in science education is the 'Ahhh!,' the excitement of doing science with your hands and your eyes. We've tried to give kids the experience of discovery so they can learn by manipulating and doing.'' Bell Atlantic's Science Institute, operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, sees teacher training as a way to help children, particularly girls and minority kids, get a bigger kick out of science. Gerald Kulm, the project director at AAAS, says: ''Because of biased expectations -- that nice little girls don't become engineers or that math and science are too hard for minority children -- they are backed into nonacademic tracks.'' The Bell Atlantic program sends 40 middle-school teachers a summer to an intensive two-week course at George Washington University to study subjects such as fiber optics, robotics, and weather forecasting. The teachers, in turn, conduct workshops for colleagues in their home school district. Back in class they devise their own science projects, helped by a $500 grant for equipment. Simple robotics gear, for example, can fire up children to learn computer languages when they see their programs move a robot's arm to pick up something. Last year EDS Corp. of Dallas took a quarter of a million students on a live undersea expedition. EDS teamed up with Robert Ballard, the macho oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic with his remote- controlled submarine. The company developed special communications gear that helped transmit a television picture live from the bottom of the Mediterranean to a dozen museums around the U.S. and Canada. Children visiting the museums could see the drama as it unfolded, including the discovery of active volcanoes and a wreck from the third century B.C. They could also question shipboard scientists via a two-way hookup. The experience is a welcome corrective to scientists' nerdy image, says Cindy Canevaro, manager of education outreach for EDS: ''Almost all the TV shows and magazines the kids see portray scientists and math people as bumbling idiots.'' This spring another 250,000 students are seeing an ! expedition to the bottom of Lake Ontario, where wrecks of the warships Hamilton and Scourge from the War of 1812 lie. WORKING entirely on dry land, Southern California Edison has helped thousands of students get more of a jolt from physics. The company's target audience is grades four through six, the stage many kids turn off to science, in part because teachers who don't understand the subject fear classroom experiments might fail. Edison, with the help of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, runs teachers through a training session and gives them a set of lessons -- about electricity, naturally, and sound, mechanics, heat, and light. Then the company sends around its $300,000 mobile science classroom. A souped-up sound room rattles the kids to show that sound is a vibration, and computers let students measure the speed of sound as it travels the length of the vehicle. In an independent evaluation of the effort, the University of Southern California found that the students' comprehension of physics grew measurably, and 90% of their parents reported that their children became more interested in science. The clever programs of New York City's Hall of Science typify the trend away from desktop learning. The hall's astronomy program features portable planetariums that fit into a few suitcases when collapsed and inflate into igloos big enough for a class and a projector. After teachers learn some basic cosmological lore and practice using the apparatus, the schools rent Starlab for $70 a day. ''In big planetariums the instructor is often a tape recorder,'' says Alan Friedman, the hall's director. ''Here the teacher becomes the real hero.'' THE EXXON Education Foundation is championing new ways to teach mathematics, especially in the early grades. The foundation is helping to bankroll many so- called state math coalitions -- of educators, public officials, companies, and civic groups -- now forming to implement standards pushed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Under the new guidelines, elementary- school children won't learn just arithmetic and how to calculate areas and perimeters. They will interpret information and make graphs, using data from news reports to understand the mathematics of pollution spills, for example. Business people needn't wait for their employers to act if they want to build the ranks of scientific Americans. The National Executive Service Corps in New York City helps math and science professionals find second careers as teachers in public secondary schools. Don Black, who runs NESC's math and science program, tries to find people two or three years from retirement. When he puts together a group of recruits at a company, Black arranges for a local professor to visit them a few times a week so they can get teaching credentials. The result: experienced novices who really know how to bring the outside world into the classroom. Samuel Friedman, an engineer by training, spent his first career at RCA, most recently heading a satellite communications operation. Teaching was a natural for him: In his old job he trained young engineers. Since last September he has taught math at New York City's High School of Graphic Communication Arts. When he helps his students calculate the speed of a satellite in geosynchronous orbit around the earth, his enthusiasm is infectious. Of his new career, Friedman, who is 73, says: ''If you're explaining something that a student doesn't comprehend, and then the light lights and you see the smile and exhilaration the child experiences when he understands, you will know the pleasure you can get as a teacher.'' He proves once again the old theorem that the benefits of a gift accrue also to the giver.