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Alex Rappaport recalls the reaction he received when he tried to market his hip-hop teaching tool at conferences in 2005.

Teachers' eyes got wide. He was called crazy.

Now educators seem genuinely interested in his products and the ones sold by several other hip-hop based companies that have sprung up.

"It used to be a revolutionary concept, and now it's like, 'Oh, yeah. Hip-hop. A lot of teachers are doing that,' " said Rappaport, the co-founder of Flocabulary, a program that uses hip-hop rhymes to teach students new words.

While no one knows exactly how many teachers utilize hip-hop in the classroom, those who sell the educational products say the trend is becoming as catchy as the music.

"Pencil and paper and worksheets and reading from a book isn't going to cut it now days," said Kelli Charles, a fifth-grade teacher at Irwin Intermediate School on Fort Bragg. "Especially with all the technology, Xboxes and video games."

Charles worked for months to bring FMA Live!, a NASA endorsed hip-hop based science show to her school last week. The five-year-old show taught fifth- and sixth-grade students Newton's three laws of motion using high energy stunts, songs, dances and MTV-like videos.

Eric Olson, an FMA Live! co-host, said teaching kids using hip-hop makes sense.

"The first song you ever learn when you are young, the first teaching tool ever is the ABCs," Olson said. "It's sung. It's melodic."

But there are stark differences between nursery rhymes and hip-hop music. The violent, sexy and profane images often associated with hip-hop have prompted some administrators to proceed with caution.

"It's a fine line that we walk to appeal to the 14-year-old student and the district administrator," said Rappaport.

Flocabulary, a five-year-old company, is relatively well known. The teaching tools and artists have been featured on CNN, MTV and The New York Times.

The company recently started bundling its rhymes with reading materials offered by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a textbook publisher, Rappaport said. More than 10,000 schools use the program, which is not affiliated with FMA Live!

"That wouldn't have happened if we couldn't prove that we have influenced test scores," he said.

A week ago, a study from the University of Indiana indicated that Flocabulary helped raise state reading scores in New York, Alabama, California and other states.

To help proliferate hip-hop in the classroom, a New York University center aims to catalog and evaluate the musically based educational materials, said Martha Diaz, executive director of the Hip-Hop Education Center for Research, Evaluation and Professional Development.

The first-of-its-kind center opened in April, and Diaz hopes to have an initial report together next year, she said.

"Once we show the impact, people will be more open to it, more accepting to it," Diaz said.

Analysa Casanova-Smith, a sixth-grader at Irwin Intermediate, said songs like the ones performed by FMA Live! are fun and will help her remember science concepts.

To illustrate Newton's second law - Force = Mass x Acceleration - two teachers dressed in large sumo suits wrestled on stage.

The teachers accelerated the mass of the suits by running into each other. The teacher who produced the most force, knocked the other teacher to the ground, winning the stunt.

"When we went back to the class, everyone was singing the song, the first song they did about movement," Analysa said. "Can they come back here every week?"