Soup Kitchen Class Feeds Young Minds : Learning: Computer classes taught by teen-agers are intended to give poor youngsters a lift onto the information highway.

The room is a chaos of children at play--shooting pool, stacking brightly colored building blocks, bouncing balls and fighting over coveted toys--a plastic, blond baby doll in a hot pink dress. Then Mary Wolf enters.

The children flock to her, pushing and wiggling and begging to be picked for Wolf’s computer class at Martha’s Table, a soup kitchen that feeds 1,300 poor and homeless people a day.

Of the more than 100 children at Martha’s Table, there is room for only 15 in the class.

“Some of these kids live on the worst streets of Washington, some have no homes. . . . Yet they all have choices and they chose to come here,” said Wolf, who left a job with NBC News after 19 years to run the program.

The 8-month-old computer class--which uses local teen-agers as its instructors--gives children basic computer knowledge and access to a wealth of information contained in expensive software programs and on CD-ROMs.

It helps the children improve their reading, writing, spelling and math skills, she said.

“We may not be doing it by the book, but we know it is working,” Wolf said. She attributes some of the children’s improved report cards and test scores in school to the computer class.

There are about 100 programs like the one at Martha’s Table around the country in libraries and day-care centers. Among the more well known are those set up through a nonprofit organization called Play to Win. Its first computer center opened in Harlem in 1983.

These programs attempt to give poor and homeless children the same information-age opportunity as more affluent children.

As more and more people communicate electronically at work and at home, these programs take on heightened importance.

Policy-makers in Washington are looking to programs like Martha’s Table to serve as the poor’s access road to the information superhighway--a collection of two-way telecommunications systems that transmit voice, video and data.

What policy-makers want to avoid, as Vice President Al Gore has said, is creating a society of “information haves and have-nots.”

The Martha’s Table computer class, which meets once a day, draws its teachers from teen-agers who go to the soup kitchen and who live in nearby neighborhoods. Some already have computer skills from school; some are learning as they go.

Sixteen-year-old Curtis Chatman comes to the class every day after school to teach. “It’s fun. You get to tell these little brats--I’m just kidding--to teach these little children what to do,” he said.

Four days before Christmas, the teachers helped their students--ages 5 to 14--use the computer to make ornaments for a lopsided pine tree in the corner of the computer room.

Singing his own jingle “Christmas tree, Christmas tree,” Roman Williams began, then aborted several designs. Finally, using a mouse, he drew a red circle and filled it with green pine trees and two houses.

His teacher, 15-year-old Leroy Rawley, advised: “You have to keep the trees spaced or you can’t see what they are.”

Microsoft Corp., based in Redmond, Wash., is the program’s chief underwriter, pledging $66,000 a year.

The program’s 13 computers--eight of which were missing parts--were all donated and fixed by volunteers.

The class also has four CD-ROM drives, which run programs combining audio, text and video on discs that look like music CDs. These and a variety of software programs were all donated.

Among the things she wants to instill in the children is a respect for the equipment, Wolf said. So the children must wash their hands with soap before sitting down at the computers. They also can’t eat inside the room. An orange poster listing the rules hangs on the computer room door.

“It took awhile to get them to do that,” Wolf said. “Many of these kids come from homes where there are no rules. The kids have come to like the rules. They respect that.”