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Games in High School?
Joe Griego of Bishop Union High School, CA asks: "I'm the Director of I.T. for a small school district, and we've implemented a 'Game Night' for our kids. We open the lab once or twice a month, and let the kids sign up for the lab computers (we have 34 of them), and play LAN games until the wee hours. It's a lot of fun for the kids, and I enjoy seeing them use the computers for recreation, as opposed to purely academic purposes. However, my question would be - do other high schools even do this?" Judging by the post-Columbine reactions from the government, parent's groups, school systems, and the media, if a school is doing this, it's probably on the QT. Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
"I'd like to know what sorts of games would be best for this activity? We play Age of Empires II, Starcraft/Broodwar, and MechWarrior IV. I would have liked to include first person shooters (for the gameplay), but I'm limited by parental concerns, and perceptions in the community. As a school administrator and parent, I understand these concerns in a way the kids perhaps do not.
Are there other games that would be suitable for a school sponsored event? I'd love to hear about experiences at other schools."
or at least the CS dept.
S C- fa01/
The local ACM chapter sponsers gaming events every so often where we take over one of the labs and have people play lan games. usually tournament style.
we even take pictures. here are some from a starcraft tournament we held.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/acm/pictures/gaming-
I work for a rather large school district in Michigan, and the sysAdmin here came up with the idea of having LAN games for fund raisers. We had everything worked out: projectors, machines, security, etc. Then, of course, the administration shot the whole thing down. Too violent. And I thought all they thought about was money.....
-Tolerate my intolerance
Good point. Wait for the expansion, or play good old civnet. Worked for me in MY high school days :-)
More than you may realize, actually. The school board I worked for has recently upgraded board-wide to IBM PII 400s, and are slowly upgrading labs towards and beyond the 1GHz marker. The older machines have, typically, generic S3 video chipsets onboard but the newer models are shifting through S3 Savage, Trident, and eventually to nVidia chipsets.
The Cisco programs for high schools are dandies; the government loves the media hype, local companies (small to corporate) like the initiative, so funding often comes in large amounts from strange sources (while the rest of the school resources are mis-managed and lacking, of course ... ), so Cisco labs would probably be at an advantage.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
At my school someimtes some kids stay after but nothing is official and only a couple of computers actually can play these games. A better option is to play star craft which only requires a 90mhz box. The problem comes in when licencing issues come up but this can be ovoided by playing games such as freecraft or freeciv. I would sudjest freeciv because it is easy to set up and you dont have to worry about violence.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
If the school has sufficient funds for computers of this calliber, then perhaps it has spent funds poorly. Give the teachers a raise. Learning typing, word processors, spreadsheets, or programming requires far less capable computers.
I would say that if a school doesn't have computers better than these requirements, then it spends funds poorly:
Starcraft/Broodwar:
Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0
Pentium 90MHz or higher
16MB RAM
80MB of free hard disk space
DirectX compatible SVGA video card
2x CD-ROM drive
Mechwarrior IV:
Pentium 2 300MHz processor
Windows 95/98/ME/2000
64Mb ram
650Mb hard drive space
8xCd rom
Age of Empires:
Windows 95/98
166Mhz Processor
32MB Ram
4X CD-ROM Drive
200-300MB free HD space
16-bit PCI/AGP Graphics Card
16-bit Sound Blaster compatible Sound Card with Speakers
256 Colour Monitor supporting high colour(16-bit) at 800x640 resolution
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
$free_speech = "open source";
$free_beer = "free binary, closed source";
The library lab computers were funded not out of general funds, but rather through the Digital High School grant. That is a state funded grant program under which we were awarded $225,000.
This has nothing to do with teacher salaries, which come from the general fund.
So, relax. Your property tax dollars weren't wasted. And remember, these computers are only used for gaming on special events, outside of class hours. The rest of the time, they are used for purely academic pursuits.
Regards,
Joe Griego
BUHS (http://www.buhs.k12.ca.us)
Don't Die Wondering