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Starting an After-School Computer Club?
Kai_MH asks: "When I moved up to my high school this year (I'm a Sophomore), I was surprised to find that there was no 'computer' or 'technology' club at the school. Sure, there's A/V, but what fun is carrying TV sets around? So, I'd like to approach my school's administration about starting an after-school computer club. I'd like to educate my peers on the alternatives to Windows (Linux and Open Source), how hardware works and fits together, job offerings in computer-related fields, and anything else that may be of interest. Perhaps we can do fund-raisers to build and upgrade a computer for the club, which could be donated to the school or community? Does anyone have suggestions on this? Has anyone tried this before? I've had a lot of support from my peers, but I'm still not quite sure how to go about it."
I don't know what anyone else told you about a computer club, but you're not going to meet any chicks that way!
---
Be braver -- you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
I hope you have a large high school, because I know at mine it would have been a fruitless attempt. (People are busy enough usually).
However, there must be some sort of form to fill out, or you can just start a club without the school's permission under your Right to Assemble. Or you can wait for college, which for me is just a giant Computer Club.
(You'd probably get more members if you made it an area club to attract kids from nearby high schools.)
(Oh yea, and don't do drugs. (For at least another two years.))
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I just moved to a new high school and was wondering what the best way to ensure I get beat up on a daily basis was.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I can tell that like most slashdotters, you are going to get laid a LOT.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do NOT mention 'hacking', 'cracking', or anything like that, EVEN if you are joking!
:-)
Remember, older people on a whole know less about technology than younger people do. They may think you're serious and refuse to allow the club to be created. Worse yet, some control-freak of a teacher may try to use it as an excuse to shut the club down after it gets started.
On that note, that's another thing to watch out for: teachers who may have agenda of their own, or just be control-freaks, who don't want to see the students actually PLAYING with technology. And for God's sake, if you're going to do anything that you think your school might not be happy about, make sure you don't get caught. (Not that I did anything like that when I was in high school...
I thought "computer clubs" were in vogue until about ten or fifteen years ago. That was when computers were new and nerdy.
Now, even the jocks use computers and a lot of people have at least one. It would be like starting a toaster club, or a refrigerator club. Is there a "sports" club at your school? Or is there a track team, a tennis club, football team...you get the idea.
If you can find a theme for the club, you'll have an easier time deciding what to do. Do you build computers for poor kids? Do you write code? Do you game? Do you dress up in black suits and go door-to-door extolling the virtues of Linux?
Find a specific theme, and the rest will become clear.
...
"Girls." Or "boys." You've got the rest of your life to be a geek. Go for band or drama or photography or something at least marginally social and get out and be active. Trust me, it'll be worthwhile.
Most likely you will need an advisor to watch over your actions, try and find someone in the school (adult) who knows about linux and open source or just computers for that matter and talk to them maybe get them to help you get your foot in the door
Xoom
...as for the post about not meeting girls, don't you know that GEEK GIRLS are tigers in...er, nevermind..hehehhe
Be creative- remember to tell people that donating computers is a tax write-off...
Just don't let it turn into the local 2600 meeting...that would be lame...
LosT
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
Unless your school is very tech focused, prepare for much public humiliation.
At my school, there are about 4-5 people who have any technical aptitude (that includes teachers) and it's scary for all of us.
The process of starting a club or sport at my school is readily known.
First, you need a sponsoring teacher (or teachers). Even if this isn't required, it would help to have a teacher with you when you approach administration. Maybe you know a computer teacher who would be interested, if not, try a math or science teacher.
Then, you go to administration and ask about it. Basically, the school is just letting you use the building before/after the regular day, so there is no real reason they would deny it. When we started a fencing club, we had to prove it would be safe, but that was all.
I'm interested to know why you want a computer club? If you guys are just going to be doing a LAN party, great, but why do you want school sponsorship? Colleges see right through BS clubs and activities.
if you start this club, you can kiss your social life goodbye.
as shallow as it sounds, i had no friends my freshman year in high school, i ran around talking about doom etc. then my friend, who introduced me to irc, etc, came to me and said "want friends? dont talk about computers"
he was right.. i vowed to never talk about computers in public again and the rest of high school was a blast..i was invited to parties, nights out, sure it was shallow as hell that the kids did this to me but hell, stereotypes are stereotypes.
this all changes in college.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Like the computer field itself, there are multiple kinds of computer clubs. You're describing the more concrete kind of club, dealing with software and the function of hardware.
However, there is also the more computer science type computer club where you could teach programming and computer theory. If you're interested in pursuing this type of club, I'd suggest you look into the American Computer Science League (ACSL). They run a total of 4 contests spread throughout the school year that consist of a prgramming assignment that you have 72 hours to complete and 5 computer theory questions (the topics are announced ahead of time). If your school does well, you can send your top 3 or 5 students to the national competition to compete.
Also, remember to include both sexes as club members (ie, don't be exclusive).
Good luck with your club!
Just don't be an obnoxious zealot. Education is about being informed of alternatives, not cramming the One True Thing down people's throats.
Show them what's good about Linux/BSD/etc and what's good about Windows and viceversa. Then let them make their own minds. But bashing Windows (or viceversa) to make Linux look better is not a very bright idea, as experience has always shown.
I.e., don't use Slashdot as your source for enlightenment. Then you'll be OK.
Producing funny CGI shorts and kickass videos for the local garage bands, otoh, will.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
I know right now you probably consider your Principal and his assistants the enemies, but they are there and do care about you and your educational experience.
Walk into the office before class starts and ask the secretary for an appointment to talk to the principal or assistant. Explain that you want to start a computer club and you need to talk to a school employee for some direction and know how.
Not only will they see you, but you'll probably get to get out of class for at least a little bit.
Explain what you want to do, and what you need from the school, also ask for general assistance and they will be more then happy to help you.
Yes, I know there is a difference between the US schools and the norwegian ones. Yes, I also know that going to shcool now and fiften years ago when I was young and irresponsible are two quite different things.
It don't change the fact that the un-official 'computer-group' I and a lot of the other geeks started was 'taken over' by the school halfway thru the first semester and all but added to the timetable for those interested. So from meeting at peoples homes, we got access to the schools computers in the evnings.. after a while one of the more computer litterate teachers joined us to talk about the things we wondered about.. and towards the end of the term we even talked the schools administration to let us use the schools telephonelines and call up various bulletinboards.
So just get together with your fellow geeks and interested non-geeks and have a good time. If the administration are smart, they'll back you up once they see that the 'club' works.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
otherwise you are going to be a virgin for a long, long, long time.
don't say you were not warned.
Are you going to be running your own wireless network? You should probably get school okay. How about your own file servers? The content needs to be okay and okayed too. Web server? Student accounts? Perhaps a gaming network?
All of those are neat projects that are definitely useful skills as well (maintanence, IT stuff, etc), especially if you have a diverse and cross platform network (A couple OS 9 Macs, some OS X Macs, a few Linux machines, Windows 9x and Windows 2k machines, perhaps a real, if old, donated HP Apollo or two, some BSD machines, etc, as well as routers, switches, hubs, APs, print servers, etc).
The real question is, will the club be *helping* the school? Because if the club just fosters kids wih bad attitude, I don't think a computer club is that hot an idea.
GPL Deconstructed
Find the most tech-savvy teacher you know and approach him/her about being the faculty advisor to the club. Unfortunately you probably won't get far without faculty involvement, i.e. adult supervision [in the eyes of the school administration], so you may want to start with that. The teacher will also be instrumental in helping you find a place to meet, like a spare classroom or even the teacher's own room if appropriate. (A biology lab probably wouldn't be suitable, but you get the idea.)
Good luck!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Uhhh, no.
Maybe YOU need to be educated on other alternatives, such as Mac OS, Unix, Minix, DOS, Irix, Solaris, etc. There is life other than Linux, you know.
It looks like you want to form a Linux club, not a general tech club. That's fine, but don't push your obviously anti-MS agenda under the guise of being a "tech" club. Being truthful about your aims would be first order of measure.
Sad as it may seem I have found it more advantageous to have an unofficial club then a school sponsored one.
I am aware that it prevents you from using the school equipment and putting it on your record sheet (of whatever the equivelant is in america) but being able to control the club has its advantages.
You can work with whataver OS you want, have a game of unreal and run the club the way you really want without the constraints of the administration.
even without being official I know our teachers gave us funny looks whenever anything went wrong with the system, even when it wasn't our fault (which of course it never was, cough cough)
unless of couse you have a "cool" computer teacher you can talk to, when i was at school our IT teacher hated the idea of students using their initiative so it might have chnaged by now. I would be very careful about revealing when you can actually do in from of your school staff though no matter how well you get on with them.
It's My Tea and I'll Drink it if I Want To!
I tried this a few years back at my high-school. I managed to pull together some great kit (not just computers, but yet-to-be-released consumer kit and other neat toys). I got the school to provide perks like free sandwiches and drinks for those who came. We even had Sir. Clive Sinclair come and speak, but never more than a couple of people turned up. It was an after-school activity rather than a club, so there was no obligation any anyone could turn up if they wanted.
It was a little embarrassing to have such a great computer society, but no members. Unfortunately, my experience has been that people of the age of 16/17 are just too preoccupied with other things like going out to the pub after school or driving about town in their friends' new cars. It might be that the fact the school I went to was a rather posh London private school didn't help, but it just didn't work out. Nobody was interested.
I hope it works out for you, but I wouldn't be surprised if people just don't turn up. Eventually I gave up and started doing the things the other guys did, and realised that you'll never win back those years of your life. Believe me, you'll have enough time to geek out at university. Go out with your friends and have a pint while the good times last.
By the way, you haven't seen my red Swingline lying around anywhere, have you?
Hey idiots, if you ever want jobs, maybe you should forget about learning about Linux and OpenSource. These don't make money, and frankly, are a waste of your time.
The Technology Student Association is a national (USA, though Germany and Scotland are members) organization for technologically-inclinded folks. Of course, TSA has a lot more to it than computers, but starting a chapter of a club that already has 400k+ members and organized state and national conferences might be an easier sell to students and administrators than a new one of unknown purpose. Also, good times. Website is www.tsawww.org
Try getting a project for the club to work on for the school. Where I taught, I used the computer club to build computers from donated parts for a computer lab at the school. The students were able to learn about computers, and the administration got a free lab. Parts are easier to come by when it is for a school, so try local businesses and even other schools! If the club had a project to build a lab, and accomplished this goal, they would be seen as a good, contributing organization. Keeps the administration off your back.
You have to ask yourself, what's the point of this club? Is it a place for people to meet and talk? Hang out after school and kill time? Learn something? Community service?
I formed a fencing club is my school, nothing much, it wasn't even a team, we just met once a week and killed time till we had to leave. The point of it wasn't to really be good at fencing, it was just fun to stab people repeatedly.
High Schoolers already take enough classes, they really don't want to stay after school so they can hear a lecture on the differences between free and Free. Make it interesting, make it fun, and end every meeting with a LAN game.
Sleep is for the weak!
As a FYI, at my school we started a computer club, FTLA (Future Technology Leaders of American, yeah I know very unoriginal) anyhow we held a few meetings, got a bunch of people that would like to be members and had one of our teachers be a sponsor. This teacher was not a programming teacher by the way, was a governmment teacher if I remember right but was nonetheless interested by the club. At that point we approached the administration and it went with flying colors since we had proved there was students that were interested and had a teachers backing.
Things went fine for a while until every time anything happened with the school network the club was blamed, kind of like usual suspects kinda deal when in fact we were not at fault. So whenever there was a break-in or any type of hacking the high school principal and police officer would show up at our next meeting, it was really aggrevating being treated like a bunch of criminals.
that's where you can find the cute chicks who will blow you even if you're not a jock. join Drama Club (do stage crew if you're worried about being an actor fag) and let the sweet teenage poontang come to you.
Our school has a computer club and I feel that it a a good thing. I give various lectures on computer related topics and people have an enjoyable time hanging out with other knowledgeable computer users.
Go for it man!
I nearly got thrown out of my school's library.
Why?
I was browsing the Enlightenment home page. (Geez, now that shows my age - back in my day, Enlightenment was being released like mad!)
The clueless librarian drone immediately insisted it was 'one of those hacker pages', because it contained strange words that she didn't understand.
Like 'window manager'.
*snort*
I deftly dodged the idiocy. I didn't feel like creating a scene, since the minute I would've opened my mouth, I would've probably been labelled as someone who could cause nuclear strikes by whistling into a telephone. *snort*
Yarr. Anyhow, the moral of the story is - don't fscking bother. High schools are havens for idiocy. You'll run into legions of dolts who will insist that you must be up to no good, because, dang nabbit, good people don't talk about things like front side bus speeds.
Here's a better idea for you: Start a local user group. Open it to everyone and all that. When you teach Bob the Tavern Owner that it's a mouse, not a foot pedal, he'll be damned impressed.
Why is that important? Well, it's never too early to start connections and business relationships. (It doesn't need to go that far - but then, if random citizen of the city #2552 already thinks you know yer shit when it comes to computers, he's more likely to listen to your spiel when yer looking for investors. Or references for jobs. Et cetera.)
The only way to get a CS club started is to convince at least one teacher first, and have him/her help talk to the adminstrators.
Another hint: don't try to sell them linux. Teachers, administrators, librarians, etc, like having something that they're used to on their computers. If you change it, you'll get the club disbanded.
Good luch. You'll need it.
><));>
I guess we have a computer club at my school. It was quite a fluke that 4 people who are quite adapt with computers, love programming, exploring new things with computers etc. A) went to the same high school and B) Developed the relationship that we have.
The reason that all of us came to Churchill (our high school) is because of this international Baccalaureate program. All of us had an interest in computers but the computer teacher at our school really allowed us to develop that interest by letting us take Cisco at lunch (because we were in IB it wouldn't fit into our time table) etc.
I can remember in grade 10 computer programming, me and one of the other computer geeks did all of the classes programs a week ahead, the teacher would then use our programs as perfect (we got 110% on them) and mark from them as he didn't know anything about programming.
That was in grade 10. When it came time for us to choose our senior level courses all of us chose Higher Level Computer science, our class consisted of 4 people. You guessed it, us 4.
Now room 112 or the geek room boasts about 25 people who come there at lunch and just hang out. Teachers will bring thier comptuers that they have fucked up with viruses or which are running sluggishly for us to fix. The school has a forum server set up where teachers can (and do) post homework online so that students no longer have the excuse that htey left it at school, also teachers can help students online.
We are given amazing freedom in our "computer club" our school had 50 or so 133 mhz computers donated to us. These were given to us (and the other comptuer people) to learn hardware on. Byproducts of this were a whole shitload of people who knew alot about hardware. We made the pimprouter - a router running linux which controlled our own little duke network. We made a beowolf cluster of 486's (or at least tried to).
ALl of this started with a great comptuer teacher
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
When I was in high school you could take 'computer courses' at the community college nearby during and after school hours. You got high school credit for them as well as college credit. We wrote some bad pascal, and wrote email to the whitehouse from the unix machine. Go look in the counseling office of the school and ask around. There's usually some sort of program for overachievers (not that I ever received good grades).
this sig is deprecated
I was the most computer-oriented kid at my school. No one threatened to beat me up. And we were a "high school exists for football" school, too.
The whole "geeks get beat up" thing is weird to me.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Take a look at some Linux User Groups (LUGs) online. These organizations are very similar to what you're trying to create. In fact, if there's one in your area, you could possibly start something affiliated with them with their help.
Developers: We can use your help.
Check with your school to see if there are any standard forms which a club has to fill out to become "recognized" by the school.
Write up a plan consisting of:
a)club name
b)purpose of the club
c)potential members (just say everyone b/c you can't discriminate, but describe who typical members would be)
d)Activities - what will the club do at meetings? outside of meetings?
e)Faculty sponsor - if you get a teacher who is willing to sponsor you (not necessarily monetarily, but with guidance), you have a foot in the door.
f)club structure - will there be officers, etc?
g)community service - is there anything that your club can do to help the community?
These are just some starting points. If you go in with something on paper and with a sponsor, you are more likely to be accepted as something other than a "kid". Adults like to think that they know everything, prove them wrong. Show them that you have given this idea a good amount of thought and have come up with a structured plan or starting point. You may even be able to get some advice from a counselor or prospective sponsor on what else to include.
Good Luck!
The problem that I had found in high school was that there were three sets of "computer" courses-typing, programming, and a "computers for business" class that would give you a rundown of Office. There was no one class that would cover hardware, networking, Linux, or anything else that an adept geek would love to know. My recommendation is to try to form a club that will cover the things you wouldn't normally encounter in classes.
And I don't mean "searching for pr0n".
--Chag
I highly recommend that you make an alliance with the martial arts or weightlifting club. Do their homework, buy yourself some bodyguards. Cross train with them. Teach them how to use a mouse, let them teach you how to snap a man's neck or bench 200 pounds. A sound mind in a sound body and all that.
Besides, as a poster above put it, you are not going to meet girls doing this. Best to pick up an activity that might help there, too.
In all seriousness, don't make the mistake that a lot of us made. Don't concentrate on computer skills and academia at the expense of things that will improve your health. Cultivate an interest in athletic activities, even if you hate gym class and team sports. It can do nothing but help you. Good luck on the computer club, too.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
Don't do it. Enjoy your high school years while you still can.
Soon, if you're any good at what you do, you will be immersed in nothing but computers.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I remember a few years back in high school when we started a computer club the biggest issue was getting computers. Unless you can do all your work on the school's workstations you will need to somehow obtain your own computers.
The best way we found to do this was to get old "discarded" hardware from various corporate sources. We hit up the local phone company and managed to get around 30 486 and 586 systems. Many companies these days have some sort of donation system where they provide their old hardware to schools, clubs, etc. This is especially true for the public sector.
These days you may also have several other options. Distros like Knoppix would allow you to play with Linux on your school's existing systems and you could maintain your personal files on some sort of USB-based storage or other removable media. That would likely be the best route to go if you had trouble obtaining hardware for the club.
WOO HOOO. "So I pushed on the lever and wires got hot, I GOT TOAST!!!!!" Man this club would ROCK!!!!!! The chicks I'll get with this clubs HAHAHAHA! You have just made me a very rich man.
i used to be just like you, now im a senior in high school. educate urself and not your peers. This way you wont look like more of a geek then you allready probably do.
First thing I'd do is talk to the teacher that
teaches the Computer Science classes. Most schools have a teacher sponsor that helps with the club. They'll probably have some idea of what to do or at least who to go to, to get the info you need.
The procedures for starting a club are varied and you'll just have to start asking.
I don't know if it will come up but I would certainly make sure that when forming the club that you are perfectly clear that the participants in the club will not be engaging in illeagal hacking, trading mp3's warez, during club meetings or with club equipment.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Great Scott! I just got back from the year 2005. Here's your group photo.
As a Karate Ka (student) you will be able to defend yourself from all of the ass beatings you are inviting by creating such a club. Unfortunately this is the way the world works.
Alternatively, to avoid said ass kickings, have parents leave house every weekend and drink lots of beer. Word will spread that drunk nerds are people too and you will get laid.
First up, to have a good computer club, you need a sweet name. A lot of schoole just have "Blah Blah Blah High School Computer Club"
BORING!
You need to mix things up a bit. I recommend any of the following:
K()MP\/T()RKL\/B
M4st3rs of c0mput3r 3dduc4at10|\|
THIS ISN'T THE CHESS CLUB, BITCH!
urn:5ea21542a24b7c67bf07296ef7728164
N0-Pu55Y-4-U5-4-3V4!
http://bunch.of/dorks
Well there you have it.
http://acm.cs.uwec.edu/
We obtained a small room and set up some Linux systems and gave people room to play with. We initially called it the UPL (Undergrad Project Lab), a name stolen from a similar student-run lab at UW Madison. I'd advise you not to likewise take the name lest Gus threaten to break your knees with a titanium crowbar as he did me.
This was back in day, so gigabyte harddrives were high times for us. These days, hardware is so cheap that I imagine you could get some good stuff happening with just a corner of a classroom and an ethernet connection.
I will definately encourage you on this one -- for me, the UPL was great experience in terms of hardware, writing user policy (especially) and other admin-type stuff, and it acted as the base from which I built the skill set that I earn a living from now. So good luck!
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Why don't you save a few steps and just give yourself the daily beatings and wedgies?
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
Well, I'm a sophomore in high school and as far as I know, these projects fail a lot. I think it was tried at my school, no one attended.
Make sure that there will actually be people showing up before attempting to create it.
So many warnings about computer club...
Computer club is still kinda cool (nerdy but most will respect your knowledge).
But make sure you never start an after-school D&D club, or have DM Manuals in your school bag... no one will never ever over-look that. Forever... trust me.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
- Now, go to the administration and explain to them how knowing about computers and technology helps students to better interact in the world today and how it creates better job opportunities, etc. BS as much as you can. This was in 1999, back when the tech boom was going on, but it'll prolly still work.
- Regardless of funding, try and get the word around to friends first, and then publicise on campus. Make sure you offer pizza or something and tell people "it's ok if you're not tech-savvy, that's the whole point!" even though you'll kick out whoever doesn't know what linux is.
- Once you get a little club going -- we're talking about 4-6 people, start doing stuff to get the administration on your side. Offer to teach some courses on Word or something. they eat this up, and it gets you ontheir good side. Now's your chance to ask for some boxes.
- Run linux on some computers, and invite people to come give it a try. Do another pizza invite. If possible, try to get a LAN party once a month to let people know that it's more than just looking at batch files. Once you get LANers there, make sure they try linux.
- ???
- profit!!
J/K, but you see how to start and where to head to. Make sure that you are always on the good side of the administration, becuase they will suspect you of being hackers. However, once they know you, and know you're just a smart kid, they'll let you do what you want.Final advice, don't give up. THere may be other kids in your district who want to do the same thing. Ask around, don't be afraid, and good luck!
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Remember that software piracy can be a big issue for an after school computer club.
So don't forget to petition the school for a fat pipe with multiple IPs so you can hook up a few people to kazaa and gnutella at the same time without all that NAT crap.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I used to be the Hardware Director of CEBUG back in the 80's and 90's. It was a club that met once a month in a library meeting room. We had all sorts of topics discussed.
::sigh::
Some compaies that visited our club were Newtek (makers of the Video Toaster), CMD (Creative Micro Designs, makers of JiffyDOS, RamLINK, HD's, etc.). There were others, but I can't think of them right now.
Ah, the good 'ol days. Back before everything that appeared on a CRT was an ad or commercial.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Bill Gates Foundation offers grants of up 1,000,000 in cash and software for high school computer clubs. We received a grant 3 years ago and built a ISO 1799 certified NOC for our school district. I learn the in's and out's of the standard, as well as the dangers of recycled halon.
Be very prepared to get laid like crazy once you establish said club.
It is feasible that you might be able to work out some sort of endorsement deal with Trojan if you play your cards right.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
If you're unsuccessful at starting this "computer group" up you may want to try Meetup which is a website to organize local interests groups. They even have a Slashdot interest group. I'm not sure about your high school, but at the one I attend, there aren't a whole lot of people (close to none) into this sort of stuff. Although, I'm bitter and unsociable so that could be why I'm not meeting any of these type of people. Plus, if I would join a computer club of any sort I would end up just wanting to kill all of them in a match of whatever first-person shooter I happen to be playing at the time. I guess I'm just an angry and hateful person.
there's more than a grain of truth in parent comment.... a LOT more.
Amen, Brother!
A comedian, who's name escapes me for the moment, said (and I'm sure I have the text all wrong) "the children are the future, and that can't possibly be a good thing, so I de-alphabetize the books in the kids section of the library"
im working on this, and im a sophmore too. im having now luck at all. basicly, the computer people are a discrace to their profession. unix is evil, with a couple winme/xp boxes my one linux box will be rooted. they also say it can bring down the entire network because it always wants to be a dns server. plus theres the money and responsibilty(i wanted a webserver and a mail server, the mail server would have to be screened. schools can be blamed for more and more now, i cant blame them on that). i do have alright networking guy at my school(hes basicly clueless but likes tha idea and is nice) but i dont think it would work out. if the sysadmins are unix all the way i bet it wont happen. i hope yours go well and still trying mine but i doubt were come up with much. i just have one old ibm pc for a webserver that not alot to be connect to the school net or the internet.
A lot of the suggestions involve not breaking stuff at the school, which really is a good idea. Instead, get your own stuff to break. Hit up local business for computers. I would recommend businesses which thrive on community contact, like Credit Unions.
You'll find that folks have old computers that they would love to give away. They won't be the best equipment in the world, but you don't need the best for what you're trying to do.
Good luck!
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I've never done this, but here is what I would guess:
+ See if you can find a teacher to be the advisor fo the club if you get enough signatures (see petition below).
+ Make a petition to create the club, and get some signatures. You probably don't need that many.
+ Take it to the administration, preferrably in a group of students, in order to show that there is interest.
Of course, really, if you have the leadership abilities to run a club, you also should be brave enough to poke around in the administration and ask them what you should do. You can't be shy and be a club president--it doesn't work well at all.
-Jeff
No way! A computer club?! We're breaking new ground here... :P
I think its a great idea. I'd start with getting together a strong core group of people who would be dedicated to the endeavor before you present the idea to the administration. Come up with a clear plan on what you want to do. Will you be a LUG? Come up with specific activities your group would carry out. Its especially appealing if you can provide a service to the general school, like provide after school tutorials on html/linux/programming/etc... Then, I'd try and get as many signatures as possible from people who would be interested in these kinds of activities.
With a core group of members, a clear outline of what you want, and signatures making it clear the school population wants this, you shouldn't have any trouble.
First of all, I think this sounds like a great idea. I went to high school a very long time ago in terms of computers, but if I were in high school now I would want to join the kind of club you're describing. I just have a few suggestions. First, I suggest that you make your club as inclusive as possible; it might be a good idea to invite in not only those who know a lot about computers, but also those who don't know much but are eager to learn some new things. It wouldn't necessarily be bad to have a "computer (geeks only!) club," but on the other hand you might find it more fun to form a club that includes people who don't know all the things you do. Another thing which might help would be to get a non-administration faculty member to back up your idea, and possibly help you get the thing started. The advantage of having a teacher-sponsor is that you would have more clout, and also you might have a better chance to get use of school equipment. My last suggestion is that you not start pushing Linux from day one. Once you have a club, then you can try to generate interest in Free/Open Source software.
YOU CAN MEAT PLENTY I KNOW SOME HERE IS ONE FOR YOU
i am not yelling i just had to capitalize a lot of things
If you don't find any interest at your high school, another option would be to give your local Boy Scout Council a call. The Scouts have a program called Exploring for people 14 and up. It is open to both sexes, and is groups of people interested in specific areas. They may have a Computer interest group running now, or can help find someone (usually a company) to help sponsor one.
It is not just your computer club, it is the opportunity for students after you leave to have a computer club. You start this, it is your resposibility to the student to come, that it behaves in a professional and reasonable mannor. get caught with 1 piece of porn, and it will be over.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At one time a general computer club kinda made sense. This was before the web and before there were good magazines or books on particular topics (for example, programming graphics on the Apple II circa 1980).
Now, you need a point. Is the point to learn to write computer games? Is the point to learn different programming languages? Is the point to learn about security? Is the point to learn about system administration? Just getting together to yap about AMD vs. Intel and Linux distros and all that is pretty worthless. Computers are tools. Focus on how those tools will help you in a particular task or endeavor, not the tools themselves.
When I was in high school - there were no guys that danced around and had limp wrists and listened to Madonna and Cher, etc etc etc - all those other stereotypes.
But upon graduation - many people came out in the safer environment of college (depends on the college).
I would argue that for your own safety, you might want to handle your love for computers in the same way.
I too enjoyed computers while in college, but in order to get by I just did at home and didn't tell anyone about it.
To be different in any way in high school is asking for trouble - do your own thing at home, but there is no need to start a computer club at school.
Seriously.
I'm pretty sure that guys that came into school and annouced that they just had sex with a goat in the parking lot would have been 100 times more popular than the kid that started a computer club.
Don't get me wrong - I make a pretty solid living now being a total comptuer geek - but in high school I spent most of my time trying to see girl's breasts in person.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
While I was in high school I started a group called the "Technology Educational Club", TEC for short. We were the main computer support group for the high school (about 2000 students) and provided some basic training on web design and computer upgrades. The other thing my group did was DJ dances for our school as well as other schools and for local events. It was a lot of fun and gave me a chance to tinker around with computers and networks.
I've seen comp sci. groups attempt to get started or become something bigger than it already was
One was at the college level, the other was more of a community wide group.
I think in the beginning there are several important things that need to be done or atleast considered...
1. create a mission statement, what is this
group's goal?
2. create a website, put on it useful information
and probably a FAQ page for newbies
3. create fliers/posters and plaster them
everywhere, get the word out
4. once you have members, you need to establish
some type of organization...either create
club positions (president, webmaster, etc.)
or something along those lines
5. once you've got an organized group, create
some sort of official constitution or
something describing your group and purpose
6. schedule events, stay active, don't get lazy
even if attendance is down, continue onward!
just my 2 cents
-neo
Instead of trying to start a Computer CLUB, talk to your administration and see if you can get a Computer CLASS started.
Maybe you could help maintain and train people on the machines your school already has? I know my high school had an art program where after you completed the first art class, you could take "Art Independant Study" and do pretty much whatever you wanted.
I think a computer class like that would be prety cool, and popular - kids would catch on quick that they could go be nerdy for credit - at my high school, anything where you didn't have explicit assignments and got class credit was instantly popular.
You might fall into the trap of having to troubleshoot computers all of the time - but that's better than the administration thinking you're a hacker, right?
1. Buy an ibook or powerbook
2. go find the goth/theater kids
3. now you'll have a pseudo-religious o/s and black tshirt wearing fruits all in one place
Or do like friend of mine - just go be a teacher's aid for whatever sacrificial lamb the school makes be the computer teacher - you'll be running everything within a month. He ran that school's whole network War Games style.
Chicks dig fellas with $$$ in their pocket. Computer nerds are now ranking up there in desireability with future lawyers and doctors. Sure... the 'popular' chicks may deny you in public, but in private, well, as long as you don't say anything...
If you do start a computer club... make sure you are in at least one athletic group. Chicks dig strong nerds.
First, remember that you are only young once
But if you MUST play games now, go to a LAN party, like most other people do
I have a LAN party every other month, and there are MANY athletes that show up to these events, but even a "jock" is going to pick on or beat up the computer club geeks on a regular basis.
Don't get me wrong, computers are great things
In a couple years, there will be MANY more people doing what you want to do now, but while you are in high school, this probably won't go over too well. Wait until you are in college to do something like this
This isn't a flame or a troll, just the facts!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
I would love to put some funny quip here, but I'm not that funny.
I was part of a group of people that started a computer science club at a college that I never finished. The first thing you should do is find a friend or four that share your interest and are willing to work towards the goal of having a operational computer club.
Next like someone else said, find a teacher that wants to help sponsor this club. If you don't have a computer class try one of the teachers that seems to always be playing with his or her computer. Chances are they are a bit of a geek too and might be willing to help.
Once you have your schools blessing you need to get people to be members. This is very hard to do. If you can organize a cheerleading team for the computer club then you have a chance to attracting more people to join. Otherwise, just start with your core group of people who you recruited in step one and begin meeting and setting up the club. We held a pizza party to recruit members and to get people to join the club. This type of thing requires money. Some schools provide a bit of money for club activities. If yours doesn't then you may have to spend a little money out-of-pockect.
Before you do ALL of this you should decide on what you want to do in your club and you want your club to accomplish. Have a goal or two in mind, otherwise you'll end up with a room full of geeks staring at each other or arguing about what to do. Both are fatal to a club.
Good Luck
All of the posts along the lines of "go out and enjoy yourself while you can" miss the point that many of us *enjoy* dealing with computers, hacking code, etc. The whole "go out and kick a ball around" attitude seems fairly obnoxious, to me - it's precisely the attitude of the "jocks" and of overzealous parents for whom "childhood" can only mean "competitive outdoor activity".
It may well be that these kids will spend the rest of their lives in front of computers -- but it also may well be that they'll enjoy doing it. Or, perhaps, that their formative experiences will give them an insight into technology that will serve them admirably in later life.
I'd spin the "go out and enjoy yourself while you have time" notion on its head, and say "go out and push yourself, intellectually, while you can". Far from being intellectually stimulating, work for *many* people is stifling and dull - and leaves little energy for personal pursuits at the end of the day. The opportunities for 'fun' as an adult are, by contrast, almost endless, the only limited resource being people with whom to do it -- and, without wishing to get into "friendless geek" caricatures, it's probably easier for the adult to find people with common interests than it is for anyone of school-going age. We have cars, we have money, we have a greater understanding of ourselves and of who we'd like to spend time with.
So, push yourself while you can -- set up your club, and weather any ridicule that may come your way. On that note, though, one warning: do endeavour to be humble and kind, difficult though that may seem. I recently sent an email to an old enemy of mine from school; he replied to apologise for his antagonism of me, and to tell me that his school years had been difficult for him thanks to his parents' divorce. It's a cliche, I know -- and besides, some kids are genuinely just nasty little bastards -- but do try to avoid treating your less technically/intellectually able peers with scorn.
But don't listen to those who would tell you that they know better than you do how you should spend your time, or how you should live your life. If a computer club seems like a worthwhile pursuit for you, then by all means pursue it. If free software advocacy does it for you, then similarly - go for broke. You'll have plenty of time for buggering around with a football later in life -- and, if you're a "geek" in the traditional sense, you'll probably enjoy it more in later life when everyone else has started to develop a beer-gut or burned out.
You should contact ACM the CS professional society. They might be willing to help you set up a better organization, and could probably put you in contact with other groups like yours.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Not sure, but I think that was Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) in one of his books. It sounds like the kind of thing he would say.
My friend started an anime club with the school in Alabama, he just asked the prinicpal. Just be honest, state why you want to start the club, how you're going to do it and what you'll need if anything besides approval. Oh yeah, don't be surprised/be prepared for by a big turnout. My friend who started the anime club got about 50 people joining up, he was originally thinking a dozen to be good. All in the middle of Alabama. who'd have guessed? I'm not saying that it'll happen automaticly, just not a good idea to get caught off gaurd.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
You realize, this will result in your getting beaten up on a regular basis. Later, after most of the emotional scaring has healed and you've made a few non-pixelated friends, someone will give you a job, and likely they'll then be scared to call you when they've "deleted the internet" or some such. Life has come full circle. Well kinda.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
Don't be lame and have an After Hours Computer Club, be a Real Man and do what we did back in '82: an After Hours AD&D Club!
Trolling is a art,
1. Forget about high school and just hang out at your local college, if you have one. Your HS teacher can probably work out some kind of authorization for you to use the college computer facilities. Also, see if there is a LUG (Linux User Group) near you.
2. For your after-school club, why not present it as a do-gooder organization that rebuilds and upgrades 'old' computers and donates them to charity? Maybe with Linux installed on them?
Anyway, are you telling us your HS has no computers at all? Start harassing the board, the PTA, the local newspaper and tell them to cough up some money and get with the times.
That isn't neccessarily true. I had a semi-large group of friends in high school. As hard as it is to believe sometimes there are people out there that aren't shallow. I don't believe my experience is a common one though.
At my school we had a computer club, we had a beowulf cluster and everything,
we had a teacher be our sponser and we got the old computers from the other areas in the school also we got sparq 5's donated from GE to our club it was pretty nice, we also got credit for it we had our own private lab that only we were alowed into, and web space from the school it was probably the most meaningful "class" i took in highschool, we called it an independent study in compsci, and did projects
At Paly, though, computers, networking, and robots are considered vocational education. "By providing desktop support to teachers and classrooms at Paly, the students in the Networking Class learn the role of a Corporate IT HelpDesk engineer, and the importance of keeping your fleet of networked computer up and running as a means to enable the purpose of your organization." This is something future MSCEs do, not future PhDs.
The trick is founding a Computer Service Club, where you actively participate in helping to maintain the school's computer systems. Provide classes for teachers, and raise money to donate computers to graduating seniors that can't afford one.
Now that you've got the club up and running, you can host lan parties after school with ease. If you have any questions as to the specifics of the club and its operations, feel free to email me [watford at uiuc dot edu]
i am a teacher. you gotta understand the school district mentality. i have tried to introduce linux many times. but there are several problems. one, school districts pay for crap, and get bottom of the barrell techs. they are not going to be able to spell linux. two, they get lotsa freebies from the redmond posse. three, sadly, linux means they don't have control. and well, that ain't gonna happen. but i'll tell you how to do it. install one piece of unlicensed warez on a box. call the BSA. they'll come down and make the district audit every box. for starters. then maybe they'll listen.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
One suggestion, don't go to the people in charge of technology. In my experience at every highschool i've been at, the supposed technology 'teachers' know far less than even the average student in programming class... Get a teacher who likes you to sponser it (if such a thing is necessary).
I'm glad there's a topic on /. I feel like helping with.
I helped to start an run ours for four years. 97-00
The Forest Lake Area Technology Team (F.L.A.T.T.)
Here are my suggestions:
First, find and talk to several teachers who may be interested in helping, by staying after, helping you deal with school politics. (Physics teachers, CS teachers, ours was actually a Assisted Learning teacher)
Second, get a room, or some place to store your equipment, hopefully a back corner of a said teachers room. This helps A LOT!
Third, ask around for used equipment, explain who you are, what your goals are. We scrounged lots of 386/486 machines this way. And installed Linux on them.
Fourth, hold regular meetings, recruit members, post flyers up around school, get in the school paper if you have one.
Fifth, Come up with some goals, we did everything from compete in computer contests, tinker with Linux, Solaris, and NT betas, and even created an AppleSeed Cluster link
Sixth, Have fun! I learned so much spending those hours after school, programming with friends, discussing the latest software and hardware.
Other things that might help is just helping the school. We did some troubleshooting for our ONE tech person, helped them out took the load off, we got some network cables from the deal as well.
For fund raising we sold mouse pads with our group name on them as well.
Feel free to e-mail me for more info if you need.
-Eric
I'm a senior at my school, and started the club this year. Though it really fell through, I have one thing to say. People are not interested in Opensource, and Linux. No one was even remotely interested in it. I offered to give presentations on it, show it off, show what it could do. All anybody wanted to do was play Quake. Don't get me wrong, but there's more to computers than Quake.
Hope it works out for you.
Location: Mt. Xinu
Instead of starting a computer club (I can't seem to get the meteor episode of the simpson's with the geeks from school riding their bikes singing we are the superfriends out of my head) why don't you start a for profit consulting service? Shit as a student, you could undercut the local companies and learn something on the side. Have students go out and fix local computer (home and office) problems for 10-15/hour. Then pull a micro$oft, and after you have lots of customers, jack up the price to $40/hour.
-Sean
hah, that's a great link. The two kids pictured on the front page are running Windows.
Geez..
One of the main problems i have had this year with the computer club is that the members drift because there is stuff they want to do but arent. Find out what your members want to do and try to do those things. Also, usually your moderator (teacher) might have interesting ideas of stuff that you can do in the club. One good thing to do that will not have teachers hating you forever and blaming you for stuff is if you volunteer to make webpages for them. Its a great way to learn java/html/flash and they could usually use a webpage for assignments, rules, etc. Just a couple suggestions and good luck.
But finding a teacher who teaches computers / science to sponsor you is a great idea. I think you should also find about 5 prospective members who are willing to help out in a substantial way. It'll be easier to have a club if there's more than just one person in it. You don't have to be an official club to have fun with computers, we just used to go over each other's houses at first and mess around with Apples.
Houses are better than school buildings. You can just watch TV instead of work, if you want, and the food in the fridge is always better than what's in the vendening machines. ^_^
Public schools are paranoid enough about hacking that you dont even hae to joke about it to make them think you are. I personally made the mistake of talking to the school networking head about our routers now hes always over my shoulder.
The idea is to find people that have things in common. We did this ~10 years ago at my high school, and it racked up several hundred dollars in a 1400 person school each year. The money was then used for club improvements, and a couple small scholarships each year to graduating seniors in the club.
Prepare a questionaire, and find a way to get most of the people in the school to answer it. Write a simple program to find the 10 or 20 'best' matches between people (say, based on the most questions with the same answers). Then sell the results for $1 each. Bonus money if you schedule sales for the week of Valentine's Day.
And of course, you can have fun in writting small data analyzing programs after the fact to evaluate how well your questions divided people up into categories (you want a uniform distribution, not a peaked one, for optimal separation).
The only hard part is finding the man-power to manually enter the answered questionaires into the computer, though nowadays you can probably set up a webpage to automate the whole process. Though don't underestimate the gains from getting all club members together in one place to do something.
1) There is a time and a place for computer clubs (and drugs)... it's called college. It's the one place where both nerdy and self-destructive behavior can be enjoyed without the scrutiny of your peers.
2) Why not join a local LUG? Last I heard there were no age or height requirements.
In jr. high, there was a teacher at my school who ran the computer lab (a dozen Mac LC-II's)... He volunteered to come in early and ran a before-school computer club. It ultimately boiled down to most kids playing freeware network games over appletalk, while one or two of them wrote BASIC programs to do silly things. Not incredibly constructive, but fun... and it got the geeks together for the first time. This led into high school...
:)
In high school, there were no clubs like this. I was taking drafting/architecture classes and spent a LOT of time in the art department. I ended up spending a year interning with a different art teacher, and we came up with this bright idea of creating a computer graphics class. So my intern class turned into a design project to help create this class. Somehow, we got the budget from the school to buy 15 tweaked-up (at the time) video-editing powermac's, an "old" amiga video toaster, and a low-end server. The first semester we ran a 2D graphics class that was extremely successful, and the second semester we ran a video course that did relatively-simple video editing. Just the first year alone brought together SO many geeks to collaborate on ideas and projects. You'd be amazed how many successful companies have been formed from that first group of students!
I graduated, but I hear that these days (5 years later) that teacher now spends 3/4 of her day on computer graphics classes! There's rumor of it becoming a "magnet school" for computer graphics. They do more advanced/realtime video editing (the morning announcements are on TV, with realtime production!!), as well as 3D rendering in the level-3 course.
In both cases, an interested teacher was necessary to sponsor the program and generally oversee it. Much of the time students can provide the creative ideas for the club/class to work on. Oh, also... Get some interested students together and have them ask their parents if their employer has older PC's they want to get rid of. The sponsoring teacher can ask the staff to do the same thing. A LOT of medium to large companies have a ton of computers that they'll donate in order to get a tax writeoff. This is an awesome way to get 50 machines (20 working, 20 half-working, 20 just for spare parts) for free, and you'd be amazed how many people are happy to do this. You can very easily get too many PCs!
And honestly... If you get a stack of P3-500's with 64mb RAM, you could build some COOL stuff in the club. Build a multi-subnet routed network (a little BSD firewall makes a KILLER simple router), just to learn how it works. A web server. How bout a MOSIX cluster of web servers? Now THAT would be a club I would've loved to join in high school... Instead, I just built it all in my room and turned it into a company (well, sort of...)
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
I work for a school district, we have 4 or 5 different computer clubs, and beleive it or not some of them are in the elementary schools. Here is how it's done here. Two primary members of the staff have to be involved, one teacher, and one administrator from the school. From there depending on what you want to do, you'd need to get the Director of technology, and a grant writer involved(most school districts have one on staff). For two reasons. Tech directors have massive bone piles, of both old, and new computers. At the very least, a lot of new parts to build several fancy computers. Depending on how nice your grant writer is, they can help bring in free money for your club. This is a must! So talk to a teacher, and an administrator from your school. Ask if you can meet with the director of technology of your school district.
>Linux and Open Source?
I thought religion was banned from schools?
Start a club to encourage people to come around to your way of thinking...I'm sure that will be a hit. And oooh, "build and upgrade a computer for the club"? A real working computer? I bet that will be the draw of the tri-state area.
Look, your enthusiasm is appreciated but you need to find another outlet for it. This is the time to stretch yourself. Look into the drama club (if there is one) or take a drama class (I had to after getting kicked out of the computer class...back in 19 and 81...it was great!). If you still have a burning need to be ostracized or need to be a super geek then check out the Society for Creative Anachronism. How about organizing a volunteer club where you work on community projects such as Habitat for Humanity? Or just volunteer...I did volunteer work in high school and college at local hospitals (yes, I was a candy striper, but at least the red and white striped polo shirt didn't look too gay). The possibilities are endless...don't pigeonhole yourself now - there will be plenty of time for others to do that for you.
Offer up some hot porn links for the teachers, and hint that you might be able to swing a web cam in the girl's showers. Watch how easy the red tape melts away.
Because forming an unofficial (read: covert) group with all the same sterotypes is going to be so much safer these days....
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
I'm a high school junior and one of my friends decided to start a computer club this year. I attended a few meetings until I realized nothing was happening. Last I heard, they got suckered into making a new school webpage. No one can program (which rules programming competitions out), and no one's taken any initiate to teach anyone how to program or anything of the like. Maybe you could have people just sorta show peopel what they do with their computer, try to get people interested in new things, and essentially provide a support group. Case in point, I suppose: make sure you have a goal going into it. A computer club for its own sake just doesn't work.
There are a few organizations that do things like this now (I am a member of one at a university that aims to "bridge the digital divide"). It's a good way to get faculty and administration support (we get thousands of dollars of university money; obviously not a range you can expect in a high school) as well as that of local businesses who need a way to dispose of old computers and equipment while looking charitable. It is, of course, also a great way to put your skills to use helping other people.
I'd suggest contacting any local schools which lack funding for technology initiatives, as well as local Head Start, childhood education, and day care centers. Many of them have outdated technology and little experience using it or integrating it into their lesson plans.
One project we are currently working on not only distributes refurbished, corporate-donated computers to these schools and education centers, but aims to set up a web and email based communication between teachers so that they can best put to use the new technology (again, we are working in conjunction with the university's school of education, so we have a bit more guidance here than you will).
This is a far better way, in my opinion, to spend your time than playing video games and teaching people about Linux, great as it may be. (Also, to save on licenses, we load OpenOffice; you may choose you load Linux as well to indirectly educate people about it.)
Pitching this as an educational AND community-service minded group would allow you to gain a lot more support, and to do a lot more good.
view it like a business proposal.
write down, in a focused document, what you want to do, who will manage it, what resources you will need (a meeting place, teacher for x hours per week, etc), what resources you will need from outside the school and how you plan to get them. you might offer some suggestions for things the club could do for the school/community (manage web site, help manage learning center, build computers for local senior center, teach computers to elementary kids).
A straight-forward document with as much cost and time information will leave a good impression and be taken seriously (most adults can't write one). be open minded to comments and advice - even if they're wrong, show interest in what they say.
be prepared for resistence. you will encounter people who will want to see you fail - take a look at the messages in this list. people who succeed do not stop at 'no' or doubt. learn from the failures and try again.
the world is about getting things done. social engineering is vital in any profession. don't draw lines in the sand and create wars. make allies and get people to work for, not against, you.
i think it's great that you show the desire to at least start asking questions. if anything, this is a good exercise for the future.
This is actually how I got started. There was an institutionalized minicomputer, sponsored by a teacher, run by a small set of students, used by a slightly larger group of students.
I'd stay very low on details with the faculty - just say "to learn how to program." Just tell them you need some castoff hardware and some cabling, maybe an Ethernet switch, depending on how you're set up.
You may want to keep your operation totally off the school LAN and just sneakernet stuff over from Internet-connected machines.
All we had was a BASIC interpreter and every once in a great while, like at night or on a weekend, they'd reboot it so you could do FORTRAN.
Linux machines - sheesh, pick your language, as long as it's not MS-only.
Another thing you might want to think about is joining a local user group. I think the idea of starting a club is great, but the best way to learn how to run (and not to run) such a club might be to trek out to a user group that is already in practice.
If there is no such group, perhaps you might want to think about starting a user group rather than a computer club that might require support from your school. Not to put down interaction with school, but it might help out if you are having trouble garnering support from teachers.
When you get the club up and running, post your web address so we can educate the club about a good ol' fashioned slashdotting.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
We are talking about computers having nothing to do with gender - not "Some activities" that might be biased on the basis of gender.
Did he say that all activities should be gender neutral? Nope.
However, you still found it necessary and to point out the fact that some things in this earth may be gender bias. Thank you for that.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Many schools don't have advanced placement computer science courses. From someone who took the test last year, I can tell you that it was ridiculously easy. As long as you know your shit, it's not hard to prepare for the examination in a quarter of the time it takes schools to do so. You do not need to be in an AP course to take the test
Push the club as something that will not only be good to list on your college application, but might get you college credits as well as teach you a few things about computers. Play around with coding and perhaps make it unconvential (but not illegal, obviously).
In the end, if you could get a few 4's or 5's out of the members who sign up to take the test, the school might take notice (having kids who do well on the AP exams is what schools are ranked on in some part) and help you out with your endeavor the next year around.
First of all, you need some sort of educational goals for the club. You seem that you have some good ideas. You want to teach peers about various things you know about technology. You just need to make sure that the other members who will join your club have the same goals.
Which means at every one of your meetings, you should have a topic to discuss and stay in that vicinity.
Many people, especially administrators, might see your club as a hacker group or a bunch of teenage warez traders before it even starts. So be sure that none of that type of stuff goes on in the club at all.
As far as all the warnings that you'll suffer wedgies, etc... I'd really not worry about it too much. A/V people are always depicted as being the brunt of the football team's abuse on TV, but at my high school the A/V people were actually seen as being pretty cool because they showed off exaclty what types of stuff they did.
Also, if "computers" is too broad of a subject for a club, you can change your focus, and at the same time de-nerdify it. Provide a project that students can put together and show off to the school at large.
For example, if you are interested in games, you could start a digital entertainment club. You can talk about game projects, stuff like SDL and OpenGL and then you might be able to wow the normal kids by getting a Linux kit for PS2 and making a simple game on it or something similar.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
the bottom line they (school admin's) said was access liability, we got around it by agreeing to take on a limited number of 4-6 graders and teach them basic computer skills after school. Not only did we feel good about it, it looks AWESOME of on a HS transcript. Once we got a few students word spread and we were given FULL access to the lab. Long after I and the other founding geeks left it has continued and grown to include access to the local community colleges lab and mainframe.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I'm a crusty old programmer; broke my teeth on PDP-8s and acoustic couplers. There are now ten million pasty-faced C# programmers and Frontpage users to compete with for jobs. My advice to you is to enjoy coding all you want, but put your energy into starting up a club for studying law and business administration.
Well, at my school, the a lot of the Computer Science students were close enough to being an actual club. We had a pair of Computer Science classes offered (by the Math department, not the stupid business department: now open excel...). Every year, the best programmers would compete in local programming contests (UIL, TCEA, etc) and do pretty well. In fact, I was the best programmer in my school disctrict (it's good sized), and our school was the best in the district. Getting awards really convinced the administration to provide additional funding. (We got a couple of free trips to Lubbock, TX, and Houston, TX (from El Paso, closer to NM), food included. Granted, we had a pretty awesome Computer Science teacher, he was closer to being one of us than a teacher. You know, Star Wars, nuclear physics, hacking, etc). Of course, towards the end of the year, the "CS club" consisted of about twenty people in a room playing StarCraft or Unreal Tournament (godlike!), including the teacher. Those were the times...
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
The real shocker is every election I hear candidates moan about how more technology and education is needed in the classroom, yet it's obvious from this topic that nothing is being done.
Here's an idea: write your congressmen and tell them you were inspired by their promise of more computers in the classroom and want to start a computer club teaching topics like alternative operating systems and system building techniques. Get a list of students who are interested in joining and send that too. Tell them you only need $20,000 to get started, and see if they don't send you a check ;)
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Maybe I'm showing my age, but AV was the best dodge you could have in high school.
You asked, where is the fun carrying around a TV? It is infinitely more interesting than many things that you would have to do if you weren't carrying around a TV (ie sitting in a health class looking at pictures of cholesterol blocked arteries).
Want to miss a class? Come in five minutes before the final bell, apologizing and mutter under your breath about the splicing job you just had to do.
Splicing is great. In the '70s, it could mean film, (audio) tape, power cords, speaker cords or video co-ax.
AV means never being called on the carpet for the classes you cut AND they make allowances for the material you missed when its test time.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
OK. all. I just spent 12 years teaching high school. I went from English teacher to computer science department (yes, the entire department). The classroom that I built had PCs, Macs, a Sun SparcStation, 3 servers, 26 workstations, Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Lindows, FreeBSD, etc. Find a teacher who enjoys it. No one blamed the 8 students who got together after school for any problems in the system. We FIXED the problems, and did more than the tech coordinator ever thought about. Played games, wrote programs, repaired computers, did a little of everything. Now, the first goal is to find a teacher who is interested in this. Yes, we talked about hacking. We shut newbies out of the school system to keep them from playing with IP addresses. There's a lot to do, but your teacher choice has to have an OPEN mind. If they think knowledge is a bad thing, you've got the wrong teacher. You have to know how to do something before you can learn how to stop it. Let us know how your idea turns out, and good luck!
Yeah.. that's a good idea. I actually got thrown out of my high school for "hacking banks," and other things like that. Someone told someone high-up that i hacked banks and stole millions.. sounds like a good deal to me. Too bad it wasn't true.. Luckally i had already graduated.. i was just hanging around to use their computers, since school wasn't officially over yet.. :)
About 15 years ago, when I was in Junior High, I started a Chess Club (another way not to get chicks). I think the most important thing I did was seek out a teacher who was willing to "sponsor" the club. I took care of getting the word out about the club amongst my friends and the rest of the student body, while the teacher took care of all of the school administration stuff. Getting a teacher to help you on the administrative side will go a long ways to getting it going.
Those who trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
p.s., take all the advice about keeping away from the authorities to heart; you really don't want to be cultivating stupid conformity any more than you already must do for class, do you?
Start an IP-based high-school radio station. This will give your group a concrete goal, and could involve lots of other groups within your high school, and have a lot of spinoff projects (like a website), and could even get you outside funding, e.g., money from local businesses.
It would also look fantastic on your college admissions.
You have to get a member of the faculty to sponsor you.
That doesn't mean money, but it does involve their time and their commitment to advocate to their peers in your behalf.
The football team has faculty sponsors (they're called "coaches"), as do the drill team, band, speech and drama groups.
You need one.
Your sponsor will be the person who can get facilities for your meetings, install-fests, guest speakers, etc. They may even be able to procure a little cash from whatever student activity fund your school may have, for refreshments.
When you are searching for a sponsor, there are couple things to remember about teachers:
1. There are good teachers and there are bad teachers.
2. Bad teachers are relatively rare.
3. Most of the good teachers have been beaten down.
4. Good teachers LOVE people like you.
Go talk to the instructors in the science and the art departments after school hours. The instructors that hang around late are the good ones. Skip the english department.
Knock on the door of the faculty breakroom at various times of the day over the course of the week and tell them that you are looking for a sponsor.
Your persistance will be noticed.
Somewhere in your school is an adult that can make your life much easier, someone who'd love to help you if only they knew who you are.
--Richard
If had it to do all over again, I'd do like the Rockdale County students did and start an after-hours Highschool Sex Club!!!
e or gia/isolated/tolman.html
0 /F ebruary/erfebruary.28/2_28_00sterk.html
"The fact that Rockdale's teens chose sex as their tool for rebellion is not that bizarre when the behavior is placed in context. Drugs and alcohol aren't always easy to obtain; however, sexuality is something the teens carry with them." Good thing the Baptist here in GA saved those kids from alcohol!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/g
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/200
Phredd - "I have found people tend to take you far less seriously once you start waving your genitals at them..."
I'd like to educate my peers on the alternatives to Windows (Linux and Open Source),
Start with yourself.
Why are you limiting your 'alternatives' to "linux"?
At my school, you would probably have the 'geek' 'nerd' 'weird' etc. tag associated with your name. So thus, no club.
Jesus Christ. You fucking people who say for this kid not to start a club are sadder than shit. Fuck. The kids just want to meet people who have the same interests in his school.
Your no help sayin' shit like: "OH MAN YOU WILL NEVER GET LAID!"
or
"You will never enjoy High School now."
Clubs in highschool are quite possibly one of the niceset things to have. I started A Car Club, and my god. Im happy i did. We SOCALIZED! Dear god. that is one of the best things a shut in nerd could do. Clubs help people do this. Who knows. Perhaps a nerd girl would show up.
What a wonderful insight into the discussion you have raised. A physically fit, possibly attractive /. reader? Who knew?
Visit my website!
Alot of schools have ham radio clubs, etc.,
so there is no reason not to have a computer
club. It would be a clean, fun way to get
people together working on things that
will be important in their futures, no
matter what they decide to do.
When I came into high school in my freshman year, our school had just started a Tech Club... the kid who had got it all together was a dork-faced senior with a pocket protector and a Commodore 64. Yes, apparently it made he feel 1337 to tell everyone about how great it was as we built a website for the school on 500MhZ, Win98 computers... point is... once he graduated... I ended up taking over. We stopped being lame... we networked our computers, installed Quake on them, and started several sevice projects.
My advice is if you have a computer lab, find out who's in charge there... they'd be your best bet for a moderator, and if they aren't interested, you'll at least need there approval to use the lab for club activities.
For actvities, we've done things like, build computers from a bunch of parts laying around, then played around with all the diff OSes we could get our hands on...
We've volunteered at local elementarys by teaching little kids the basics of computers: how to customize and navigate the OS, opened up a computer and showed them what the parts are, how they work, what they do... and taught them how to surf the web...
We enrolled in a cell-phone and printer cartridge recycling service which gives you money/prizes for collecting so many cartidges
One of our biggest feats is that we brought in chicks... YES! I SAID CHICKS!!! At least where I come from, there are few women interested in using computers. It's mostly because they don't know how to. So we marketed the club as a "learning" club. The geeks like myself and the original members teach the new people the ropes about computers. They in turn have brought their friends into the club... We have about 25 members out of 600 people in our school. About 8 are women... and next year's enrollment proves to be even better!
So remember, it won't be big right away. But if you establish a good club, eventually it will catch on.
Lastly:
-Be creative with your ideas.
-Be persistantin getting the club together.
-Get friends/parents/teachers involved.
You'll have a great club in no time.
(BTW, I'm a senior now... today was our last meeting of Tech Club for the year... they voted for new officers and I sadly had to hand over the keys to the kingdom... but knowing that I helped get the club started, and hopefully it will be around for some time to come)
I hope that helps! Good Luck!
We were in the same position; I was one of the founding members of our Computer Society, which has since been flourishing - here's what we did.
First and foremost, the absolute requirement is to have a sizeable number of people who are interested. I'm afraid that in my experience 'build it and they will come' does not cut much ice in this area - we had about a dozen people, which is enough to fill a small-ish room and so make meetings to voice support seem well-attended and popular :-) Basically, by asking nicely, and by getting the support of a Computing teacher, we managed to persuade the Powers That Be to grant us the use of a lab - complete with Ethernet & power around the room - outside lesson times to do what we liked with. We also managed to scrounge a few machines that were going spare - old Macs, mostly. From little acorns...
We used to hang around in there and experiment a bit, and very quickly the mini-network we had established (totally separate, as an imposed requirement, from the then-repressive school one - and so without any internet connectivity etc.) began to grow. People donated parts or computers; someone's Dad's surgery was clearing stuff out, so we got a server and a whole bunch of Vectras; we picked up arcane things like ancient Suns and SGIs; we bought a bunch of decent Compaq desktops off a failed .com for 25 quid each. We soon had more computers - a few dozen - than space, plus a good collection of books, bits, software, etc.
We all helped set things up, fix broken things, install software, build a proper network with roamng home directories, unified LDAP logons across multiple platforms, etc. (mostly Linux, but a few other Unices and a bit of Windows and classic Mac OS on the side...) It became actually usable as a resource, and people who weren't initially interested started to use our systems to learn to program, etc., which was very hard to do elsewhere. We lent them books, helped where we could, and so on. We ran projects, like robocode competitions, which were popular even with younger members of the school. We experimented with new things, like beta releases of Mac OS X, and Windows remote desktop things, so that we now provide all of the Windows applications from one application server to the Linux desktops. And so on, and so forth. We got up to all sorts of things (like this), wrote various neat bits of code and taught ourselves a great deal in the process.
A few of us wrote some software which turned out to be very useful to the school (a fairly advanced web-based content management system) and fought long political battles over how far pupils were to be trusted with such matters - would we put secret backdoors in, and so on. We finally reached an agreement which now promotes this sort of activity (previously frowned upon but now with more projects in the pipeline), and, as a bonus, guaranteed us the continued use of our lab and an internet connection.
Anyway, I hope this gives you some idea of what it was like for us and was vaguely helpful... Let me know if you have any questions.
Because a bunch of people sitting around playing instuments or painting scenery is more social than a bunch of people sitting around complaining about Microsoft.
There are two kinds of social in high school:
1) Doing an activity with other students that will almost certainly prove utterly unrelated to what you do after graduation (except for looking good on a college application), and,
2) Consuming various controlled substances with other kids.
If this guy wants to burn all the extra time he has because his classes are way to freaking easy by taking on a leadership role and starting something new, that's a valuable excercise. WHAT he's starting isn't nearly as important as starting it.
paintball
coors
http://www.fundingfactory.com/ that's the recycle place... you should check it out!
yeah i've run into the same problem at my high school (freshamn this year), it really sucks how there's no computer related clubs or after school activites dealing with linux, or computing in general. its so fscking annoying how all these machines at our school are still runnning NT. its such crap!
1) Move to new school
2) Create Computer club
3) ???
4) Profit!
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
I just graduated from high school, and was on a club which I think is very similar to what you are trying to start. I was lucky to have a school which was very technology orientated, for example, we were a regional Cisco Academy, which was great for only having 400 students in the high school. It was a 1337 club, or as close as one can get at a high school. We had interviews to get in, where we had to demonstrate profieciency.
As freshman, we began by fixing teachers computers, terminating cat-5, creating user accounts.... As were got older and better, we moved onto video editing, designing and supporting the district website, terminating fiber... In the 6th year of the Tech Team, the school started offering it as a class, because they saw the amount of work we were giving them free. They let us have one class period, we would fix computers and all the other stuff, and we would get credit, based on initiative, success, and amount of time spent working outside the class.
The biggest project I got to do by myself was create a website for on-line tests, homework, and a place where students and parents could communicate with teachers. Also, I had to provide a mail and DNS server. I was allowed to spend $8,000 of the school's money myself, which shows the trust they placed in us. It was great experience for college, the work force etc. The largest project I worked on with people was rewiring the school for Cat-5, terminating the fiber, and installing new switches, routers, and a PIX box. We did this free of charge, which helped the school out immensely.
Basically, we had our school's network guru in charge of us, then the seniors (or whomever was the best) take their orders from them, and dissipate the info downwards. We had one main room for everyone, but upper classmen got desks and "their own" computers (still the schools, but we were the only ones to use them) (these computers also happened to be the best in teh school, but we WERE working for free). We also did Adopt-a-Road as a comm.service project, and set up a network at our local police station for free.
Feel free to use this as a model for a proposition for your school board, just let them know that they potentially have a lot of free labor, just so you guys get to play with the equipment.
As a side note, we did get several benefits. Tech period was one of the most fun (no lectures or notes BS), we could get out of class to fix stuff ("umm, i think they need me in the tech room, otherwise your e-mail won't work" -- "sure, go ahead"). And every year at least one of us got keys to the school so we could go after whatever sport we were in practice.
Nerd alert !!!! Nerd alert !!!! Nerd alert !!!!
Yo buddy, did you get a load of that nerd !!!!
One of our teachers started something like this the year before she retired. It wasn't just a computer club, but rather a whole group of clubs that weren't normally clubs that students could get together and enjoy. They were called "Creative Arts Teams," and now there are over 20 of them! Check out the list at the school website: http://www.elkhorn.k12.wi.us. If you send an e-mail to someone I'm sure they could send you more information about it.
If you are interested in starting this or just a computer club, there are still a few things you need to keep in mind.
1. Find a teacher that understands what you want to do.
It doesn't matter what teacher is your advisor, but make sure they understand what kind of club you want this to be. Don't just go to the computer teacher, because maybe they will want to do the club their way, and not necessarily the direction you are intending to go. Which brings me to my second point...
2. Clearly define the goals of the club.
Make sure not only you know the rules and regulations and the goals of the club, but also make sure other teachers know about what you want to do. As said in some other comments, teachers are frightened of students who know more about computers than they do. Our school went so far as to have a "blacklist" of students who had to be watched when using a computer! Don't let this happen. Make sure the boundaries are defined.
3. Get the teacher to find an outside advisor.
The teacher may think that they can teach the clubs activities or have a student direct it, but this doesn't work so well (I know from experience). Try to find a small business owner that can advise, or sometimes you can find a retired computer store owner or something like that, someone who has the free time to spend teaching stuff. Even if he doesn't end up doing too much, at least he'll be able to give some good tips/ and or have some ideas for activities.
4. Find some old computers that the school has stored away.
The school will invariably have some old computers stored away. USE THESE! Schools are pretty anal about people putting junk on their newest systems, and with the old computers you can take them apart and play with stuff. This is where the advisor might come in handy. You can learn all kinds of cool stuff about hardware that you normally wouldn't learn until college.
5. Make sure you cater to all students.
Don't make this a club for just the "hacker elite" for your school. Make sure that all students know about this club, not just a select few, and make sure they know that it's not just for the computer literate. One way that you can remove the stigma of "hacker" from the extremely computer knowledgeable students is to have them teach those who know less than they do. In fact, my economics teacher was a part of our club, and it was cool to be a student teaching a teacher!
I hope these tips help. Good luck starting your club, and remember that it will only be as good as what you put into it!
When I was in high school(82-86) my school participated in the American Computer Science League (ASCL). Its an organization that organizes computer science and programing contests for high school students. Check out www.ascl.org for details.
It may not fit perfectly with what you have planned but it may be an "in" to the school administrators. ASCL is a nationally recognized organization. Participation may help you make your case for club organization (and resources) from your school adminstrators.
I wish you the best of luck. Access to such a club will not only be benifical to the students but also the faculty. You are doing your community a great service.
1) advisor -generally a teacher though depending on the school district it can be any employee of the district 2) funding -if you want to do anything mildly interesting you will need a budget 3) goals -what are the intentions of the club 4) bylaws -these may or may not be needed, though even if not required you will probably want some eventually Good luck and have fun. I personally started my schools computer and German clubs. Being president and founder of two clubs looks damn good on the college app =) p.s. who cares what other people think or say about you being a nerd, in college no one will care.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm on the web development team for my high school, and I've been trying ever since my Junior year to get the admins to allow us to install Linux on ONE or both of our web development machines, which are dedicated to us. They refuse under the pretenses that Linux presents a security hazard, and that they are not qualified to administer anything besides Windows NT. God I hate stupid people...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Google it. Basically, its a program you can have started at you school where all the techies can join. It's not exclusive to computers, but hey, digital cinematography and digital art make it all worth it ;) anyways, this is a national program that was started at my school when a guidance counselor told me to "join a club". Turns out, after P(r)ep Club, and Jock Club (no kidding), there wasn't really too much else offered. So I got to googling about computer clubs and found out its really awesome. Here in Kentucky they have yearly big events at the Lousiville Center with all kinds of computer hardware vendors and stuff. Dell, Compaq, HP, Lexmark, and a bunch of others came up there to show off their new technologies to us. We even got to test drive OS X before it came out!!!!! (That made the day for most of us, watching that program that displayed the little bomb movie then launched an attack against itself trying to crash the computer was pretty impressive, back then I didn't even know of anything like it. well g2g, check into it...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I'm sure this has been addressed here before, but I'm going to get on my soap box for a second.
Why the hell is there NOT a standard for computer education in this country now??? I can see how 10 years ago it would have been hard to predict where technology was going to go, but I think now we can really start teaching kids at least some of the basics as a mandatory public education requirement.
For example, when kids get out of school they should know what a byte is and how it relates to their computer. They should know how RAM is different from a processor or hard drive, and they should at least know basic HTML. And if I had my way, basic troubleshooting skills.
I work as the IT guy in a small design office. I work with people that sit in front of computers all day, yet I'm routinely asked "what is an EXE file", "what is a Megabyte", and "Why wont this 3 GB file go to the printer". These are very basic things in my mind.
There is no denying that computers are here to stay, and a lot of people will have to use them on a daily basis. It should be the responsibility of the government to make sure all these kiddies get some sort of an idea of what they are doing.
BAND CAMP
It's pretty hard getting a computer club up and running, I tried that in my High School, but most of the hardcore computer users graduated my freshman year, Soooooo, It was me and me that would have been the club, and some other people that had some psuedo-knowledge. The only person that seemed interested was the librarian, and she was cool, and she also let me install linux on one of the machines (this was around the year 2k, and i was a senior then), but then some stupid kid pushed the machine over, and it fell on it's back, there fore ruining all of my work. And through all of that, it wasn't worth it.. I just did my fun social computer stuff outside of school.
With college its even worse, because at my school, you have to, apply, get money (once a semester), then use it, or you lose it. And since I goto the school that won the NCAA b-ball championships... Being a computer geek doesn't help either, heck, I have a hard enough time getting my friends to play anything other than a sports game! Trying to get my fellow comp. sci people to use anything but windows is a problem too. Sooo unless you have a large group already, no matter where you go, that's gonna be a struggle.
Good luck though!
One thing to think about: do you really need your school's help with this? Does it need to be tied to school in any way? You're a human being, ya know, and so are those other people. It's ok to get together on your own, without any sort of "official" acknowledgement. Who knows, these other people could even wind up being friends instead of mere classmates.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't know how your school is, but I tried to set up the same thing when I was in high school. I was even able to secure an old XT, put WWIV on it and use a phone line in one of the teachers' rooms to set up a BBS.
I was hoping to not only create a club, but use the BBS as a public forum for the students. I spread the word and the activities of myself and the group I was in got printed up in the district newsletter. We didn't get one kid to call that BBS besides the people who had a hand in setting it up, let alone anyone to join our club.
There weren't even any takers from the already-existing Math/Computer Club, mostly beacuse those kids were into math, not computers, and its membership was so weak that I somehow got elected to Vice President when I sat in on one of their meetings.
Eventually I was pretty much the only one calling the BBS, so I said screw it and opened it up to the community, bought a copy of TradeWars, got rid of the school related messageboards and replaced them with general ones, and let them have at it. At that point I pretty much pulled the plug on my idea.
The moral of the story: Joe Student will not be interested in what you have to say about Windows vs. Linux. 3/4 of the stuff you will say will fly over their heads anyway. I hate to tell you to not even bother, but my bet is that you already know everyone in your school who knows anything about computers...All 10 of them. Why go though the formality of starting a club? Just approach these guys and ask them if they want to talk shop during lunch, or maybe go to a LAN party sometime, or have a Linux hacking session after school? I met some of my best friends this way.
-R
Just get a bunch of friends together, and go talk to the administration. Our school has a Cisco certification course, and while most of the members of the club come from that course, some, like myself, don't.
And, you won't become the societal rejects that everyone is yelling about here. I *personally* don't have a girlfriend right now, but a lot of the others do. It will have no impact on your social life, contrary to popular belief.
Another comment I've seen is that there is no need for a computer club, since everyone has one. In ours, everyone could be considered an enthusiast. We aren't the average AIM-junkie teens, even if we use AIM to communicate when we're on our computers. Many of us run Linux (myself included), program (ditto), and generally know a lot about computers.
We aren't social outcasts, we just have different interests than others. It may be different because we are living in a generally upper-class area, I don't know.
However, in starting this club, you'll meet many cool interesting people. LAN parties and dumpster diving is fun!
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
My h.s. computer club got off the ground by getting a teacher to sponsor a extra-curricular field trip to a programming contest. We sent 3 or 4 students, along with a teacher, to a local college's programming contest. By my senior year, we were going to three or four a year and meeting on a weekly basis. It helped a lot in college.
Good luck...
Back when I was in high school(82-86) by school participated in the American Computer Science League (ASCL). Its an organization that organizes computer science and programing contests for high school students. What I learned from participation provided me a great leg up on my CS peers when entering college. See www.ascl.org for details.
It may not fit in exactly with your plans, but ASCL is a nationally recoginized organization. Participation may help legitimize club creation and aquisition of resources in the eyes your school administrators.
I wish you the best of luck. Such a club will prove an invaluable resource not only for the students but also the faculty. You are doing a great service for your community.
I posted one of those "Enjoy yourself while you still can." posts.
Like many, I got interested in technology early.
There was no computer club at my school, and I wasn't exactly a social outcast, so I decided to skip the middle man and go straight to work in the "computer industry" at the age of 15. This was following a couple of non-tech jobs, including an office clerk-type role and an AutoCAD draftsman.
I also got very involved in a local LUG, even so far as to call myself a co-founder, helped plan weekends events, etc. Also did basic sysadmin stuff for my high school.
I don't regret anything I did, quite the contrary; I just wish I had done it a little later. After two years of working at a dead-end dot-com (you could tell it was going to implode) and helping organize large weekly events for the lug, not to mention dealing with computer networks and their associated bullshit at school all day for one reason or another, I realized that I was doing too much, to soon, for the sake of a) pursuing this one aspect of my intellectual curiosity and b) getting into a decent university, which was pretty much guaranteed anyway. I wasn't one of those people who was going to drop out of high school for a $50k/year job.
When I was around 17 (senior), I drastically cut back my hours, loosed my involvement with the LUG a bit, and started having a non-insignificant social life. For that year and a half before I went to college, I had the best times of my life with the friends I have known all throughout high school but never really had time to hang out with. I took the money I had made, bought a nice car, and some nice things, experimented with the ALKY, picked up the guitar, and drums, and piano (again), and just generally did OTHER stuff for a while. Took some nice vacations with my friends, and a whole slew of other stuff that I can't list here. It's not like I was going to start saving for retirement or something back then.
So what if it throttled my hot-blooded pursuit for intellectual supremacy for a while? Big deal. Now in college, I am in the thick of it again, including contract work, school work, volunteer work, and extracurricular business development, and I am absolutely grateful that I allowed myself to take the time off. I think it's critical in preventing burnout, and you should do it starting early as possible. I wasn't about to turn into the grizzly-bearded pear-shaped UNIX kook that impressed me so much, for some reason.
If you enjoy what you enjoy doing, you will ALWAYS be able to do it, given that you sufficiently intelligent enough to support your interests. But my suggestion is take some time to enjoy something that you won't get a chance to do again, like ENJOY HIGH SCHOOL. Your mileage may vary, my experiences are only my own.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The trick is to be as inconspicuous as possible, and do the little things first.
As others have mentioned, if possible, first get a faculty member who will support you. In the very least, such a person is a handy referee for club-member disagreements. They may also already know the process for starting a new club, and if you're lucky, the teacher's contract for the school district you're in specifies extra money for teachers who advise clubs.
Next, go to the lowest possible member of your school's administration and ask "What is the process for starting a new club?" Don't say what kind of club it is, don't try to make appointments with anyone, just ask that EXACT question.
Pay VERY close attention to what the answer is, and do EXACTLY THAT. If you're lucky, you just have to have a certain number of people sign a form. It would be a shame if that's all you had to do and you made the mistake of making an appointment to have your principal scrutinize you.
The other advantage to starting LOW on the totem pole is it leaves you plenty of opportunity to go over people's heads. If you get shot down by the secretary to the assistant principal, that's not nearly as bad as getting shot down by the school board, in which case you're done.
So ask a lowly secretary first, if your school is small and doesn't have one, maybe a guidance counselor or someone else whose position is to try and say yes, maybe math department head.
We follow this procedure for paintball clubs all the time, and it is by-and-large successful, despite paintball clubs likely being far more objectionable to the masses than computer clubs.
paintball
You should try to start an ACM chapter at your high school. We had one when I was in college (http://acm.jhu.edu), and it was a huge success. Because there are so many successful student chapters, you should be able to easily convince a member of your faculty to sponsor you. It would be really sweet if your school would pay for student memberships to ACM too. They're not very expensive if I remember correctly. See http://acm.org for more details.
(1) Get a teacher to sponsor you. That means that he will handle the ACSL [American Computer Science League] contests. He'll give you the assignments, and collect your results.
(2) Join the ACSL. Get in on the contests.
(3) Let those who want to participate, compete in the contests. If you do well, you'll get to go to the national competition, somewhere else in the country.
(4) In between contests, those who participate will usually teach each other more about computing.
I know that this works [and doesn't take much of the teacher's time], because when I was in high school in 1982-7, that is what we did. We also took 2nd in the nation, one year [Harrisonburg High School]
How looks your geekroom?
This is exactly what I was thinking.
A club at your school could be really cool but you might also want to check out what User Groups are in your area: there are Java User Groups, XML user groups, Linux, Apple, etc. Plus organizations like SAGE. Even if you decide you'd really like to see a club at school, these other organizations in your area can offer support.
The exercise of looking up these organizations on Google is left to the reader.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
First, find a teacher to sponsor you. Your CS teacher (if there is one) is a good choice, but not necessary - my sponsor is a science teacher.
Second, you have to pitch this right. Don't even *try* to explain the meaning of hacking (in the Jargon File) to an administrator unless you want big trouble. Also, explain how this could help the school. Last year, my school was being rebuilt, so we did a photo-documentary (digital) and are building a webpage. Or build websites for teachers; they're usually easily impressed, so you can start with very simple HTML and move up. My club sells mini CD-Rs (3-4") as a fundraiser. Whatever you can do that adds value to the school is a big selling point.
Third, get folks from outside your school involved. Bring in local programmers for a tutorial some day. We've got a local programmer who has given the club a lot -lessons in HTML, linux, and Java, and just general support.
Fourth, communication is important, since you (usually) can only meet once a week. Start a listserve or message board for the club.
Finally, what resources do you have? Does your school have any computers they're going to throw away? Install linux on them. Or you may have a member or a person in the community (point #3) who has a linux box that they'd be willing to give members accounts on, so you can telnet/SSH in. This is valuable, as most teens don't have the $ for the Windows box their family wants *and* a linux box.
Good luck, and keep trying. It's really worth it.
I can sympathize with your library plight. When I was in high school I got thrown out of my school's library for "hacking DOS" after I went to the DOS prompt from Windows(3.1) to copy a disk. Later on, when my programming class took a trip to the library, I had to use a computer separate from the normal student pool so that somebody could sit over my should and watch everything that I did. People are idiots :(
If you want a recruitment tool, try Knoppix. If you don't know, it's essentially a Linux distro that boots cleanly off of a CD, with no install required. An easy way to nudge people onto using Linux is to just hand out Knoppix CDs at school. It's about in the technical range that most highschoolers can understand.
Most schools have a system to start clubs (how do you think that all those other ones got started?) You go to your vice-principal's office, pick up a club-request form. Then you have to get a faculty sponsor for the club (that is, a teacher who will support the club and sit there for club meetings and be accountable for what goes on there). Then you probably need to get a petition signed by a bunch of students. You will probably also need to fill things out on the form that state club purpose, etc. Once you've got that going, turn it in to your administrator and wait for approval. (I can't possibly see a club like this being denied in this day and age.)
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
HA! Red Swingline... Kills me every time! Thanks.
Remembering your name in the morning is already a good start...
By the way, you haven't seen my red Swingline lying around anywhere, have you?
This one? :)
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
However, this was about 7-8 years ago and a lot has changed since then. Many more people that age have grown up with computers in their homes and have at least some interest in them. So your chances are probably much better than mine were. Just make sure you have plenty of people who are willing to join in to begin with and find a teacher who actually cares.
Of course, I did end up disabling Foolproof Control on the school's macs, but all that did was allow some kids to play decent video games during recess time instead of lame kickball/football with the idiotic jocks.
Tell me about it. I changed the wallpaper on a Windows 3.1 computer back in the high school library years ago, and the admin made a big scene, I was kicked out, very embarassing.
I imagine it would be a lot worse now as well.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Then the jocks would beat the crap out of you for more than one reason.... if you'r going to make an outcast nerd of yourself , you might as well cover all the bases.
I was YACN (Yet Another Computer Nerd) in high school and was VP of the Computer Club my junior and senior year. We were mainly left alone by the rest of the student body, with the extreme notable exception of one of our fund raisers. A bunch of friends re-started the defunct club my sophmore year and somebody said that we needed to raise some cash for club activities (pizza). Our teacher-leader had written a computerized dating program some years back and we took it out and went through the code, made some changes, learned how it worked and then had a fund raiser. Handed out 1000 flyers with 20 or 30 questions for free to all the students, and charged $.50 or something to get your top match, $1 to get you top three matches, and maybe $2 for your top 10 matches. We made a couple hundred bucks and had a lot of fun matching ourselves up to the cheerleaders...
I changed the wallpaper on a Win95 comp and almost got thrown out of school. Thing is they had a program called FoolProof that shoulda stopped it. FoolProof just isn't, though. Luckily I was taken in as someone to help with security instead when I showed them how to prevent it and a few other things I had found.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
I nearly got thrown out of my school's library.
Yeah, me too!
Why?
Me and a friend linked the hard drive to clarisworks, and vice versa. Oops! But it sure was a lot of fun watching them not nail us for it. They knew it was us, even had system logs, but the IT guy at the school was too stupid to know that my friend had a mac boot disk.
My school has a computer club already, but I'm the only one in it who's really interested in computers. We don't do much except have a party at Christmas, do a "softwear" drive to collect peoples old coats and donate them to the salvation army, and generally don't meet. We used to do the school web page, but that got transferred to being a class, which I took once and was really bored with. The computer teacher who sponsers it can't be swayed towards anything other than microsoft on gateways. All of your suggestions sound good, and I wish I were in your position. Good luck! I'm afraid I haven't really given myself much time to think about any suggestions, due to a pressing English term paper, but I'll be sure to post them here if I do think of something.
Because it's about grace. It really is about grace.
At my school we don't have a computer club. Frankly, like alot of the other posts here, i have to agree that a 'computer club' would turn away people because everyone 'knows' how to use a computer. What we have at my school is Botball where we get to program robots to play a game versus other robots. It looks really good on college resumes and such too. This is just one idea. What ever you do, get a sponsor, and provide a clear purpose for whatever club you want to form. If you have a purpose its alot easier to get organized. Just founding a computer club leaves too much ambiguity.
N / T
but I bet you run into a stuid administrator that thinks you will be focusing on how to crack into systems rather than how to program and how to set up a linux box or just bragging about the latest mobo/proc you bought.
administratos are always far below the curve
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
No. I believe you would have the world's first computer club (according to the US Patent search).
Greetings Cliff! I am a Junior at Alcoa High School in Alcoa, Tn. At the school, we have something that I guess you could call a "club" but we do not. Alcoa has developed a team of students, picked in the summer before their freshman year, to be one of three students selected (in a school of about 400 students) to advance their technological skills. The team is separated into a few parts: Computer Troubleshooters: 1) Being primarily an Apple school, Mac techs are needed. 2) Several classes ("business" classes mostly) have machine running Windows, so troubleshooters are need for them as well. Server Troubleshooters: 1) People to fix the network anytime it goes down 2) People to fix the school email, web, dhcp, or proxy server in event of a crash Multimedia 1) Design and maintenance of the school's webpage 2) A/V person to work on video projects using Media 100 Also, during the breaks (Summer, Fall, Christmas, and Spring) the students come in and work on projects that cannot be done when students are in class such as running CAT5 cable or any troubleshooting/maintenance that needs to be done. This program at Alcoa has proven successful. In 1997, the three schools in the Alcoa School System (Elementary, Middle, and High) became networked in full by the team members. No outside help was hired. The majority of all computer related problems are fixed by students, saving the school a great deal of money. The program Alcoa offers has given students great experience in the tech field. One former student has created his own electric-wiring company, another works at TechIt Solutions traveling everywhere working with Apple and many other tech corporations. The Alcoa Tech Team webpage (although very old and plain) can be found at http://www.alcoaschools.net/District/technology/de fault.html
Hard Hat Area: Sig Construction Zone
Just do what I did:
One day at lunch, when the computer teacher ALWAYS leaves the room with his terminal logged in as a "system operator", (or "sysop" as they used to be called in my day), conveniently use his terminal to create a new sysop account.
Then be really, really stupid like me and tell someone you did it.
Then, two weeks later, when you've forgotten you even did it, after half the school knows the password to that account you created, teachers have been deleted, new classes have been created, library fines have mysteriously vanished, and the teachers finally trace it back to you, you'll be sitting in the vice-principal's office on a very hot seat.
Then, you find the guy you told and beat the living crap out of him for giving your name during the interrogation.
Finally, accept the network administrator co-op position that they offer you next semester, because they figure you must know what you're doing with computers, after all.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
First of all our school tech was pretty damn cool and was totally into the idea. You definately need someone like a teacher to back your case. Second, point out a way it might benefit the school. We set up a webserver on a computer not in use and maintained a webpage for our school. Also some of us, just for the experience, helped the tech on our own time just for experience. Wiring labs, setting up new software, etc etc. Third, don't give em any reason to disban you. Don't screw around with stuff you don't have permission to, don't be running around the school, etc. There's my advice.
you mean like making fun of the loser administrator who can not properly secure the macs by changing the permissions on our home folders so anyone can browse the network to get into them and using resedit to change the keyborad layout :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Back when I was in Hogh School, 1979-1983, a computer club would have had a purpose. Very few people used computers, and even fewer had one at home. Todays everyone has access to a computer and huge numbers of people own them. What purpose would a club serve in that context?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
My High School has a computer club (or at least did at some point). Bascially, it involved a bunch of kids sitting aroung after school playing Quake. It eventually got disbanded I think because the administration found out it was just about computer games.
I think if you really want to start a computer club that is not focused on games, you'd be best off trying to find a few members first. Kids our age that like to program or advocate Free Software, etc. are hard to find. Plus, if you do, the odds that they'll want to join something so nerdy as the Computer Club is low.
I can't think of anyone in my school (of 700) that would be interested in that kind of club if I were to start one. I could certainly start one if I wanted to, but it's just not worth it.
Keep your hacking, Free Software and computer nerd side of you private -- unless you want to be a big social outcast.
At my school, the computer club basically consits of people sitting around at pc's and using some obscure BASIC like programing language in order to feel "3137". I say let those kids be happy, but they get really annoying sometimes when they think they know everything about computers. Of course, its always fun to ask them something like "what distro do you run?" and have them say something like "I have a dell".
Don't get me wrong, you sound like you make a hell of a geek wife, but alot of those things you mention are actually the things I love about women.
Sure there are times when I want them to just throw on a damn t-shirt so we can go to the grocery store, but there are also the times when I want them to spend time looking nice. Something just doesn't feel right if I'm not getting harrassed for buying the latest IPod. There is a nice system of checks and balances there.
Maybe you can get the school to let you set up your own genetic engineering lab!!! You could work together with the biology teachers and if there's a school garden you can try to grow tomatoes that glow in the dark or maybe breed some kind of intelligent hampster or something....
Just a thought.
Well, you could have a dumb school like I did. We had a computer club that was supposed to allow people to meet other people who liked programming and use some of the school's equipment. However, you have to watch your back. We had one idiot student who brought in a disk with an NDS bomb (we had a Novell network) and a Windows password file cracker. He was, of course, caught and the administration shut the whole program down, never to let anyone start it back up (this happened four years ago).
Find a teacher with some computer interest/inclination. Ideally find one who is coming up for tenure and needs to work on his number of extra curricular points because he/she is a geek and doesn't coach.
Convince this teacher that you have a sincere interest in helping sort RAM or reimage lab machines. You might like to set up a linux box on the intranet to house a chemistry class project, blah, blah, blah.
If you rant about how you are "leet haxors" or come across like Bevis and Butthead, or if the teacher thinks you are going to be a liablity, you are toast. No teacher needs another set of headaches.
i hate to play the cynic, but i dont think this is a good idea.
you sound like an intelligent scholar, i imagine you would aim to pursue a university degree. much of the knowledge you may gain now will be useful, but i doubt a computer club at high school will teach you much you wont learn later. lets not kid ourselves, when you're out working in the real world, much of what you learn at university doesnt even matter.
high school is more of a social experience than anything else. if you take nothing else from high school, leave with the ability to interact socially. you have nothing to prove at this level--this club will unlikely teach you or your peers much of what high school is supposed to teach you. thanks, but if i want to learn about cisco routers, ill take a course on them at college. theyre far more resourceful, concise, refined, and fun--the people around you are learning things they want to learn. its a great experience.
high school is a completely different experience. don't waste it, you'll regret it.
Take French.
I took 3 years in High School, and I'm 2 clases short of a minor in college (22hrs total, senior level college french literature classes are freaking hard). Most of my classes had 3 straight guys, 5 gay guys (no competetion), 6-12 hot girls and 6-12 freak girls (they can be fun too!).
Your ratio to straight guys to hot girls is around 1 guy to every 3-4 girls. Even a total nerd has a shot in hell. Plus it makes you look "worldly" to try to speak french. Not to mention the old saying that spanish is easier is a joke (they are both based on latin, as well as portuguese and italian).
Unfortunately I met my wife before beginning my college french classes. There was some amazing eye candy in there. Oh la la....
I am a teacher in a public Middle school in Carrollton, TX. I started a robotics club this year in order teach students robotics design, programming, teamwork and other skills. We use Lego Mindstorms and Handyboards in our club and program them in C, specifically Interactive C and Not Quite C (NQC). We also have one system running Linux as both IC and NQC are available for Linux.
My administration is very supportive of the club, providing money and other suppport through the year. The main difficulties in the club was raising money for the equipment and to pay the fee for the Botball competition we entered.
I applied for a grant with our local Educational Foundation and received $1,000 to fund the initital purchase of equipment. Your school district probably has an educational foundation that provides grants to teachers and students. Find a willing faculty member to sponsor your club and help you find funding and support.
Before I received that grant I began teaching the students C using a free Windows compiler I found on the net. It was perfect as it allowed the students to write Windows console applications without worrying about the code over head of a real Windows application. You can find the Bloodshed complier here
After we got our initial equipment I searched the net for grants available to public school teachers to fund technology applications. I applied for an $8,500 grant from The Verizon Foundation. This money will be used to pay our Botball entry fees for next year, and buy more advanced equipment for the students returning next year. I have had so much interest in the robotics club that I will probably have three clubs next year.
...spend more time meeting females than playing with computers. Trust me, there will be plenty of time for the latter, there is never enough time for the former.
----- "It's all fun and games 'til somebody puts an eye out, then it's just funny."
A buddy and I worked with our comp tech our first year of HS for some vocational thing. something like 5 hours a week. Basically we cleaned dirty mice.
Later when we found out the default password on teacher's accounts was "teacher" (student accounts were student, it wasn't a great leap) we just had to brag to people. One of them got busted, ratted us out and my buddy lost 30% of his mark in that class cause he used skills taught to him by the tech. Yes, cleaning mice gave us that knowledge. (And no, I don't know why I didn't lose my mark.) I was also threatened with being charged. It was quite funny.
Next year, new techie, new principle and I was working with the tech and the same friend and I set up 3 new labs and wired one wing, wrote a program to generate random passwords for every account, and setup and ran the schools webserver for the next 3 years.
It is in my experience that school district computer administrators are complete and total assholes. If i tried to explain my experience with them...well just let me say I would need a website just for it. In fact im still going through some shit with my school district b/c of the admins. Ill let you know how it ends when the state police is done with the case. :-(
75% of all statistics are made up!
i have a limited ability with perl, python, am good with html, css, javascript, etc.. and i type 120 words a minute
does anyone realize how horrible all of this really is in high school?
when i first came into my current school, they made me do a typing test.
i hit 122, which was 30 words faster than the "school record..."
in "large group"(imagine an assembly at most high schools, only they mostly just give out credits and awards.. it's a small school)... i got a "typing award" called "lite speed..."
from then on, i was known as the guy who types fast.
THEN, my computer teacher put me in a "special" course she wanted to pilot...
further setting me apart as "the computer guy"
then, i was over heard telling the district's repair guy an idiot (he was. he pulled the motherboard out of the tower in his bare hands, and then proceeded to DROP it onto the floor)
and finally, i have been commisioned to be the school's webmaster (which i accepted because it's easy credit and i can put it on a resume to hopefully avoid mcdonalds or such).
but now that i've been set this far apart.. people are constantly approaching me, asking me all kinds of questions.. some i'm happy to answer... things about linux, mozilla, tips on good books and sites for learning various things, etc...
but then you get the kinds of questions that over-the-phone technicians dread, only... the teenage versions:
"umm... me and my girlfriend were..um...you know.. heh heh.. and we bumped a pepsi onto the keyboard... how do we fix it?"
"yeah, i just downloaded a lot of porn and i think my mother expects something. what should i do?"
"i tried to put one of my old tapes into the slot on my computer, but it wouldn't fit... what's wrong?"(he was trying to put it in the floppy drive... gah!)
but yes... being distingiushed as "the computer guy" is not all that it's cracked up to be. but, i guess it's better than "the pothead."
and here is a picture of there Star Trek club.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Earlier this year a couple of friends and myself started an after school linux club. The administration was a little apprehensive at first because of attacks on the network the previous year. We presented a complete outline of our intentions, got a teacher to be an advisor and did all the necessary paperwork, we were even able to get some old hardware (both desktops and laptops) donated to install various distros on, while at the same time teaching those interested the pros of using open-source software. Navigation using the CLI was taught first, along with basic commands, and topics expanded from there. Overall i think the program was/has been a success. Through teaching others, I have furthered my understanding, and spread the benifits of open-source.
Jackass
NERD!
I founded a physics club when I was in high school. At first, my attempt was met with resistance. The physics teacher was mean-spirited and tried to prevent me. He told me clubs were for sports and I was only trying to get money from the school for selfish reasons. In the second year I got a lucky break. A new physics teacher, who just transferred in, told me he would be very happy to be our advisor. As for members, I enlisted 4 people by looking up the names of people who were checking out books on advanced circuit design from the library. Although the club name was "physics", the activities were mostly electronics-related. One member wanted to build a music synthesizer, another a pinball machine, and the rest, including me, a computer. We did end up getting funded by the school, and built 2 functioning computers. (FYI, the phrase "building a computer" in 1977 meant soldering TTLs together.) In the third year, due to some PR, we got a couple of female students to join.
Download Mazes and Puzzles from www.puz.com
>> Perhaps we can do fund-raisers to build and upgrade a computer for the club, which could be donated to the school or community?
Write up a nice letter asking for the donation of a new or used machine. Talk about your school, describe the club, and reference the faculty advisor assigned to your group. Send it to locally based businesses and businesses with large operations in your area. Pick businesses that have or use lots of computers (asking the local paint store is a long shot). When the machines start rolling in (and I guarantee they will), make sure to send thank you notes and publicize the names of your benefactors if possible.
I'm a male (straight) computer aficionado and I like to buy expensive clothing (counterculture but expensive none the less) I like people who dress nicely and work out. I'm still a geek in that i'm a gadget head and love OSS and computers, but these stereotypes are simply odd. I have friends and know people who don't fit this mold too. This whole geek stereotype may exist, but it is hard for me to believe taht the majority are like this.
Photos.
I went to a public high school (J. T. Hoggard, Wilmington, NC, class of 2000), and I started the School Computer Service and Information club (Yes, SCSI.) Here's what I had to do to get one started:
First, find other interested students. You can't have a club unless you have interested students, so go find people who'll be interested.
Second, go find yourself an adviser/sponsor. I used my guidance counselor, who was both a good friend of mine, and was taking computer classes at the community college to help her keep up with new technology. Find a good teacher who's enthusiastic about this kind of stuff - not just one who'll sit around to make sure nobody breaks things, but one who'll actively help you lead the club. Unless you've got experience running clubs before, you're going to need some help. I had no clue what I was doing with fundraisers and such, but Mrs. Spackman helped me out a lot with getting things organized.
After I rounded up a good number of students and talked to our to-be-adviser, I had to talk to the Student Council. Usually, they're the ones who control the formation of official school clubs and such. I had to write up a club constitution and purpose and present it in front of the Student Council Association, and they voted on whether or not to instate us as an official club.
If you get approved... congrats. Now you have to run it. Service around the school and community is good. We set up a project where teachers could leave us notes saying they needed help, and when they were available, and we'd send out a club member to help them during free hours or after school. We also managed to help out some people around Wilmington, and helped a nearby school system build a few hundred computers after Hurricane Floyd destroyed all of theirs.
Finally - make sure you prepare next year's club leaders before the year is over. After I graduated, the club lasted for a few years (and our adviser got moved to a different school), and I currently don't know if the SCSI Club still exists. Better preparation may have helped us take care of that, but who knows...
Good luck with everything!
I "graduated" high school in 97. In previous years the HS had a very active computer club. Unfortunately, all of the intelligent, active, motivated members were seniors, and all graduated and left my freshman year. The club was never the same. There were only three of us freshman with any interest in the club, and one of them was one of those old-school arrogant pompus ass holier than thou unix slackware zealot who hated to help anybody with anything so he always came off as being smarter than everybody simply because he didn't share his knowledge. I hate people like that. Anyway the club floundered and our 8-line BBS which had 1000 users a few years earlier dropped to about 50 active users thanks to the Internet. We wiped it and made a linux box but we weren't able to offer shell accounts to the general student body due to fears that we would use it to download porn, bomb recipies, etc (not that anybody really needed a shell account on that machine to do so. I sure didn't.) So that never went very far.
A very similar story has unfolded here at my college. All the cool people left a year before I got here, some idiots took over the club and drove everybody else away, and now it sucks. All we do is run one linux box, which is admitedly a bitchin linux box (dual 1.4ghz P4s, 1gig ram). We finally got rid of the assholes but so far the club hasn't garnered much new interest.
Anyway the point has been made here but I'll reiterate that computers are now ubiquitous. You can't really just have a general "computer club" anymore. You should really try to focus on something more specific, like computer games, computer programming, computer hardware, whatever the members are interested in. Nobody is going to want to sit around and swap floppy disks with the latest freeware like they used to.
So a couple of things to do:
1. Keep it FUN! It's a CLUB, it's supposed to be recreational.
2. DON'T LET IDIOTS ADMIN YOUR BOXEN. Choose admins based on their level of capability, not their seniority. This isn't Japan. If you maintain servers that aren't strictly for experimentation, make reliability the absolute priority. There's nothing that will piss people off more than waking up to find that the admin has formatted the server in the night for no particular reason and all of the projects they've been working on are lost (it happened here).
3. KEEP IT FUN! Find activities that everyone can enjoy, and keep it simple and FUN.
4. The only reason to form a high school computer club vs joining an online chatroom or something is to socialize in real life with your neighbors. Don't let people forget that it's a social activity.
5. Keep it fun.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
*** THEY ALREADY KNOW IT ***
Yes, that's right... The three other people at your school who would consider joining your club are going to know about these things already. And to be honest, chicks aren't gonna dig the geeks who get into this club.
*** WANT TO REACH AN AUDIENCE? ***
Then do something more popular, interesting and hip.
Start a club called The Future Club. In this club, cover all issues facing our future, including environmentalism, science and technology. The science and technology part can include discussions about everything from space technology to software, a category that includes discussions of alternative operating systems. The environmentalism part is in there for several reasons:
Do this and you'll be popular, your voice will be heard and you'll be screwing three different chicks all at the same time and none of them will know about the other two. Oh yeah, and your words will be more respected when you tell these folks to chuck Windows in favor of some geeky thing called csh, where they can type such horrors as 'rm -rf *' while logged in as root. Not to mention the fact that these hot chicks will be talking to YOU!!! Like that cute blondie that sits in the row in front of you in social studies... Yeah!
1. Write down what you want to get out of the club.
2. Write down how you are going to achieve step 1.
3. Do it.
Get one or more sponsers from your school to help with the aforementioned plan.
Get you school library to purchase more computer books. Note that most computer books can be order through the inter-library loan program if your school library does not have the ones you want.
Enlist the help of your local linux user group for help with respect to presentations and tutorials.
go here:
http://www.webcrunchers.com/
I'm sure he'd love to help you out!!!!
So you're less interested in starting a computer club then you are in "educating" people in Windows alternatives. That's called proselytizing, not educating.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Step up and lead. Go ask a teacher or the principal how to do it at your school and do it. If you want it to go really well, find a name that is catchy and does not sound like the "junior chapter of the society for the advancement of computing machines."
Back in the day I was a freak who liked to play soccer and I started a club for all the soccer nerds at my school. Now I laugh when I think of all the people who said it would go nowhere or it wasn't cool.
$G
-- $G
Find out about programming contests in your area, maybe sponsored by a college or tech business. Check news:comp.programming.contests on Usenet. Your school may get invitations that are now being filed in the trash because there's no one to give them to. Tell your school's administration you want to field a team. They'll like the possibility of greater glory for your school, and the teamwork and competition are fun.
I volunteered for four years at a public high school that needed a "coach" for a programming team, for an annual competion hosted by the state university. At the time, the school didn't have a teacher who knew enough about programming to invent practice problems and answer questions that weren't answered in their introductory textbook's teacher's edition. They put a call for a volunteer out to the local computer user group I was in, and I volunteered and spent a couple hours a week to help give the kids' hacking a little direction. I showed them a few algorithms and data structures, taught them to partition problems for team competitions, and they showed me the games they were writing in their free time. It was fun for all concerned, and a couple of the guys went on to CMU and MIT.
Programming is often a solitary activity, but as the Extreme Programmers have found, it's fun and productive to do it as a team. Good luck with your group.
hrmm.. sounds like a lot of effort. I found my life just as fulfilled by replacing my computer club with a nice healthy crack addiction..
Nerds! Nerrds! Nerrrrds!!
We had a computer club when I was in high school; FYI, the best fund raiser we found, BY FAR, was to run a computer dating service. We'd have booths at various student activities where kids could sign up--they'd pay a fee and fill out a short questionaire, which we would input into the database. To get customized date suggestions printed out they would have to apy another fee. I never heard of anyone *actually* going on any dates based on the service, but everyone was dying to find out who the computer would match them up with. Like I said, this was a serious money maker for us!
At the same booths we would also sell customized biorthym charts--utter rubbish, but hey, people pay for horoscopes too! This didn't earn as much as the dating service, but was still a good secondary product.
Good luck!
If playing networked games are to be a part of your club, when you're working on your speech/application for why the club should be allowed don't forget to mention all the skills you'll be learning:
* Dual limitless resource management (Total Annihilation)
* Dual limited resource management (*craft)
* Single limit(ed|less) resource management (C&C, TA: Kingdoms)
* Cooperation (team games)
* Group coordination and leadership (ie, setting up an attack)
* Civil design (base layout)
* A deeper understanding of physics (various FPSs, plus a host of other games... like Worms!)
* Learning to use the right tool for a job (IPX vs TCP/IP, certain units in RTS games, weapons in Worms...)
Be creative! Pick a game you like and go marketing on it.
A few friends of mine and I started a similar club at my school. Basically we were sitting at a LAN party, having a great time, when one of my friends wondered what it would be like to have even more people. Things started rolling from there, and we ended up forming a LAN club. No computer talks or anything like that, we just hosted LAN parties. Here's basically how it worked:
- Officially got sponsored as a school club (all it took was a teacher to sign a form for us)
- Started talking with friends, gaging interest
- Found a location to host the party (friend's church - nice and cheap)
- I as the technical guy, I designed the network and power layouts for a LAN
- Used school for publicity (signs and stuff) and for meetings to gather registration money
- Gathered enough money from registrations (well, I kinda loaned the club a bit of money) to buy some nice switches and pay the church
- Ran 2 kick-ass parties (40 and 72 (!) people)
Honestly I think we broke quite a few school rules by hosting the LAN party off-campus without our sponsor present, collecting and spending the money (on switches, etc) ourself, and generally only using the school as a means to draw a crowd. But hell, it worked and was great fun. Well, then we got lazy this year, never got re-registered and it basically fell through. But on the up-side I had $600 of networking equiptment (club-bought) lying around that I ended up selling off. Oh, and free sponsor stuff is great!
For more info (including pics of the parties) check my website here:
http://rufus.d2g.com/~lan/
As we say on SA forums..
R->C->P
Simply put, make it work for you. My sophomore year, one of my teachers (on whom I had made a good impression) volunteered me and another person to write articles for the local paper, this gave us a in with the administration, the next year me and another girl (the first had graduated) started a school paper. We had to pay the school for printing costs and put in time to write, edit, print, staple and deliver the paper. We put in lots (although it didn't seem like that many) of hours and the next year, they had budgeted money for them. I wouldn't expect money (we happen to be carrying out a pet project of one of the top dogs), but it is plausible. A couple of quick tips (1) DO NOT ask for money, don't imply it, and even have fundraisers ready, one that won't interfere with other fundraisers (we tried to sell graphically edited pictures, and our samples were of the principal), don't even let them think you want any and (2) keep sight of your vision, I abandoned the paper my senior year for a number of reasons, including a change in our sponsor and some rudeness from them, and the rather large group that took over was disastrous (one "writer" wrote his articles by literally going to MTV.com and printing those articles) I disassociated myself with the paper at this point. We also had vision issues before the paper was started, as our idiotic principal wanted a paper that would put a "positive" light on the school. By stepping up and saying, "we want a paper by the students and for the students or we will abandon this project" I risked the future of it, much better than the alternative of a lost of Freedom of the Press, of course he was aware at this point that our judgment could be trusted. This is what I did, and if I had been the least bit interested in journalism (I just wanted a steady school paper) then I would still be involved, even now that I'm a sophomore in college.
In the end, my overly long story comes down to this: make sure you fully educate your administrators on what it is you are to be doing in this club lest they smite you with their ignorance and put an end to this club, whether or not you are truly doing anything wrong.
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Oh wait, I'm not a teenage boy anymore and I spent all my time thinking about sex. And I use my computer to collect pr0n.
Take the earlier advice and do this the most efficient way possible. Beat yourself senseless and pull your underwear up over your head.
I have a LAN party every other month, and there are MANY athletes that show up to these events, but even a "jock" is going to pick on or beat up the computer club geeks on a regular basis.
Dammit, are American schools really generally that bad? I mean, we get that impression from imported TV but I always assumed it was an exaggeration to make shows more interesting
My experience at school, here in the UK, was that being overly interested in academic or 'geeky' matters certainly earned few friends - except like-minded people. A minority of others would pick on us, but very rarely physically - schools simply don't stand for it. At least, not the kind of schools that have more than one geek per year.
I would say that such activities really do earn no friends among the 'fashionable' or 'mainstream' crowd, but would you rather have a few good friends who you really got on with, or be another anonymous face in the crowd?
Hey! I'm a Senior Network Admin for STAC (check the ws for info: www.stac.org) at my HS. Basically, my 'job' is to run around and make sure that our 13 linux servers and 400+ client boxes are running appropriately. STAC runs its own network separate from the district's, although we often end up fixing crap that the district owns and is too lazy to deal with in a timely manner. We wrote our own curriculum and had it implemented into the networking and cs classes at the school. Honestly, I spend a good 2 class periods a day working on this type of stuff. From imaging labs (fun fun fun! Esp when Ghost goes haywire), fixing DNS, IPTables, and DHCP issues, to simple 'reboot the computer please' style tech support. I would suggest the following: Hook up with a teacher and a friend or two who know what they are talking about. See if you can't scrape together some old hardware into a functioning network that you can show off (READ: Bring your own stuff for temporary use if necessary). We have gotten so well liked by the administration that when the district threatened to cut our T1 line due to some legal issues, we (students) were asked to talk to the head network support team and plead our case. Not only did we convince them that we were worthwhile (we have more computers on campus than any other school in district, yet our official helpdesk file is smaller than many of the elementary school ones), but they offered us funding. I hate to sound like I'm bragging (OK, well I am...), but you have to make yourself seem worthwhile before you'll get what you want. I've stayed at school until 7:00 or later many times this year alone (school ends at 3:30), not even counting the saturdays we come up to do work on. The other 3 senior admins and I were at the school weeks before classes started getting labs ready. It takes dedication, but you can get really far. All of the Senior Admins have gotten jobs due to the talents we've gained doing this work. --Ari
Once the library got pissed at my friend for getting a Powerpoint iwht a command line FTP client.
-1 Sad. I really didn't mean that to be funny. :/
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
It was pretty easy for me an my friend to start a club at my school. The problem is getting people to join. A had the same reason to start a club as you had! My school has a computer academy, but it was bullshit, no real computer work, working with diff OSes. It was basically creating webpages which is pretty lame.
My friend and I are not focusing just on computers, but technology in general, basically a lot of technology related stuff that is posted here on slashdot we will be discussing. That way it won't get tedious with just computers.
Well I hope you get it off the ground! A BTW i'm a sophomore too so your not alone.
Yea...schools can be really strict on this. Trust me...I know. Let me tell you my sad, sad story. Our school webpage has a ranking of the most visited pages on their site. Our school announcements come over the TV but our homeroom didn't get the TV announcements but we did have access to laptops and the announcements on the school's. The link to this page was at the bottom of teh most viewed links, so my friends and I thought it would be cool to have that the number one link just for kicks. So, being the geek that I am, I made a 2 line php script that accessed the page a bunch of times. I ran it an night and low and behold it accessed the school's site 60,000 times that night. I didn't think it would be having any affect on their network (being run at night and all) and it was run for another night. Well, the school noticed and I got busted. (Not sure how they knew it was me but whatever.) They called me a hacker and said that I slowed down the schools entire network (even during the day when the program wasn't running). I don't see how this was possible, but I got blamed for it anyway. For my punishment I wasn't allowed to use a school computer for a marking period. I didn't think I would have gotten in trouble for something like that. Because I have never been punished before in highschool, I just expected a "Don't do that again, crackhead" and that would have been the end of it. Guess i was wrong.
SIGFAULT
At my H.S, starting a club is easy - you have to write a constitution, and the "student Body Council" accepts / rejects it. Im part of an autonamous submarine project club that got started a few years ago, but each year you have to get the club "re-accepted." One thing I hate about our school is that you have to do community service in order to be the club. The carrot at the end of the stick is that you get $100 / year if you do. Big Deal! in 3 years we've blown through about $40,000. We still have to do community service though. Damn Nazi's.
Too bad geek girls are just as unattractive as geek guys...well, I guess it works out for you then.
life is a game of musical chairs
You just wish you were a girl... take off those panties, man, you're disturbing me.
Pursue your interests.
If you can't get a faculty sponsor, organize a group through the local library.
Of course you can talk about aspects of computing that interest you, give presentations to others in the group on CS topics.
How about seekign out donations of old computers, configuring them with Linux, making them available to local charity & community groups, church/synagogue/mosque groups? Lots of people who could use a computer and can't afford one, let alone the MS software.
Become known as someone who understands computers CAN lead to summer jobs and part-time consulting work through the year. I've noticed on person at Perlmonks.com (Japhy) is 19, got started with perl at 15, regularly publishes articles; I doubt he has a McJob at his uuniversity.
I was involved in a computer club at the high school (houston TX) I went to back in the dark ages of 3 years ago...
;)...
We had a computer club, and a nice one at that. The club met (mostly) every day at lunch, and sometimes on weekends to have coding contests with other local high schools. Setting up a club in a high school is fairly easy, simply sign a few forms ad find a teacher willing to stay in the classroom during lunch and you are set there. The hard part was getting the hardware out of the cluches of the administration that knew nothing of computers. They had rules regarding things that could, and could not be loaded onto computers, and when they learned that we were going to be loading unix onto one of them they had a cow. We got around that problem by having teachers donate their old computers (the school was upgrading their comps. and givng the old ones to the teachers, who were going to throw them away.) to the teacher in charge of the computer club (not to the club itself as they would then fall under the rules of the school regarding computers, and not to the students so that they would not disappear rom the club when we graduated). We then had about 16 P2 boxes and a nice little server that had seen better days. We did a bunch of tweaking, a bunch of installing, and played more starcraft then probably anyone at blizzard ever did...
You may also want to look into a group called the American Computer Science Leauge (ACSL) if you are going to be doing any programming for your club. They have 6 (Im not sure about that number) written programming contests in which students have 72 hours to complete a program, then it is 'tested' with mostly boundary-case data. If the club gets a high enough score then it can be invited to nationals, which is usully someplace cool.
Oh yeah... one other thing... make sure any computers that are owned by the club are clearly labeled as being not school property. The rent-a-cop at our high school had a fit when he saw us carrying 16 computer out of the school on a saturday morning. That was fun
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
High school, is nothing but a play pen for children in suberbia while their parents are at work. With that said, I'm a high school student, who is part of an Honor Society that revolves around technology. The truth is, there really aren't alot of bright kids in your high school. When the Vice President of this was running, he said he was good for the job becuase he had a network in his own house. When I asked him about it, he said he just bought himself a router from CompUSA and plugged it in, and actually fowarded a couple of ports to his system with his "mad skills". My group of friends, who as I see it are the only people who know something about a computer, end up bringing up interesting ideas, and then have to hear, "We wouldn't be able to carry it on" with a tone of resentment becuase they didn't understand a word that was said. However, it does mean something for collage, and I am even trying to establish a national technology honor society for the high school level. Who knows what will happen.
The defacto technology club is the Technology Student Association. This is a state and nationaly affiliated organization that has been around since 1978. They hold state and national technology competitions, including computers. I've really enjoyed my participation as chapter president and state reporter for Florida.
For more info, check out http://www.tsaweb.org or http://www.florida-tsa.net.
I was in a computer club at my school, but all they wanted to do was play CS. In fact the whole goal for the club was to play CS in school. They wanted to branch off and repair computers but they got lazy and played CS. I and a couple branched off and started a buisness. My point is, make sure that if you do have a computer club make sure your main purpose differs from playing CS or whatever you kids play these days
Whose main goal is to Repair the schools computers. You just do all of the stupid net-admins work and they still act like they know more than you. Preatty soon, you become more intune with their network, and they become afraid of you, thinking that you may launch a worm into their crappy win nt network. Morons.
To most of your peers, the greatest thing about computers is MSN instant messenger and Yahoo! chat rooms. They don't know or care what an operating system is.
The best way to suceed is to gather all of your friends and threaten to boycott running the school's slide and filmstrip projectors. That will show them.
From my very limited experience, what you want to do is:
1. pick the person who is in BEST with the administration to be your spokesperson when dealing with them. (anyone who is volunteering in the admin dept should be good) you want to spin this as a positive thing
2. immediately request a form for non-sponsored/sponsored club formation. my school had these forms but kept them from me for over a year because they didn't like the idea behind the new club
I was in the same situation that you are in. This is what I had to do: 1. Find a sponsor for the club. (a computer science instructor is a good choice) 2. Find a purpose for the club. (I live in rural Illinios and I was able to find 3 different computer competitions for high school clubs.)
Well, not all high schools. I went to high school a few years back in a grossly underfunded jurisdition (Ontario--at the time the provincial Minister of Education was a dropout, which admirably encapsulated the government's attitude towards education). There certainly wasn't any money to be had for staff to maintain the school networks. The teacher responsible for the computer labs realized that there was a tremendous resource right at his fingertips. Several of us were drafted. In exchange, we enjoyed admin privileges on the network, as well as frequent gaming nights.
I imagine that there are a lot of schools where a small group of dedicated students would be glad to trade some of their time for extra privileges. A little quid pro quo is wonderful thing. Also, this sort of activity looks good on university applications.
~Idarubicin
1. Hardware is generally not *too* hard to get a hold of: local businesses are a good source.
2. See if there are any local user groups in your area -- they'll be a good help. Here's a start: http://www.apple.com/usergroups/ -- go find the Apple User Group in your area: they're all a bunch of fanatics, and I'm sure you can weasel a couple of old iMacs out of them.
3. Get your PTA involved. An "old computer" drive shouldn't be that much more difficult than a bake sale. Not to mention parental pressure tends to really help with getting school adminstrators to assist as opposed to hinder what you're trying to accomplish.
4. Get your School Board involved. See my PTA comments above.
5. Once you've achieved a certain amount of momentum, you can try and get the club registered as a user group or SIG for whatever OS/Application/etc. is of interest to you. If you do it at the OS level, you can then start trying to invite different vendors to demo their products at your "user group" meeting. They want the mind share, and while you may not be able to afford the new $200 Flubbawidget version 4.5, they're banking on you being able to get your parents to buy one.
6. Don't limit yourself to the Math department: for example, the Music department might derive some benefit: there are a lot of helpful instuctional tools for ear training, reading, etc. Chemistry. Biology. Astronomy. archive.org has some great historical stuff. The Gutenberg project has some cool stuff as well. Set up an Apache server that's a portal to departmental resources outside of the school -- you'll potentially make the teachers' lives easier and help fellow students get better grades.
-- The common thread with all of these things is that if you can convince someone of the benefit of doing something, whether that benefit is real or perceived, they'll generally go along with it: people don't like saying no.
In any event, whether or not anyone graduates to go onto a computer-related career, the social-engineering experience will prove invaluable.
- learn to swim.
Here are some clubs and activities in my highschool after the usual school hours...
1.) Environmental club - after school, you go around collecting recycling bins. Except you get to talk about oil-poisoned sea gulls when you are done collecting trash like a janitor.
2.) Newspaper club - Face it. No one reads highschool newspapers. It's shit going back to the recycle bin.
3.) Drivers Ed - This is always taught by some monotone guy with the worst driver's record. Where's the bloody videos?
4.) Math club - Two hours after school + Your daily school hours = too much time in a classroom.
5.) Drama club - You might be Tom cruise, but on stage..... You will always be surrounded 95% by testosterone charged teenagers who will f*** up your show.
6.) Bowling club - We have this every year. I see the sign up sheet. There is no bus to a real bowling ally. There is no facility in my highschool? Rolling over cans with a kickball in the cafeteria doesn't count!!!
well, i used to be un 'A/V' but that was mainly a bunch of computer geeks. a small bunch of corrupt geeks that had more power than the principal.... then again having the master key to the entire school discrict had some benefits.... so that was out technology club also. since we messed with the latest and greatest at the time that we and/or the school could afford. but if you want to start your own, get a steady group of people to show up during lunch or after school. then apply to the principals to make it official. as time goes on, recruit the underclass to keep it going.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
Here's a "get started" question. I'd make it a "Ask Slashdot", but then listen to all the people say "Google this" and "Google that". I've thought about doing a "Books on CD" type of operation. Usually fast changing books (Technical information for example) on CD or DVD. Maybe even downloadable over the Internet. However there's a couple things. First would the target audience even be interested? Keeping in mind people's reaction every time the "Death of Books" topic comes up here. Second of course is "copyright violation", keeping in mind for a business getting off the ground, every dollar counts. How best to handle the issue for all parties concerned in this venture? Third is of course finding authors that people actually trust, and don't cost arms and legs (my problem really). Fourth what features would people want? What formats? But I wanted to float a trial ballon before investing time, money, and energy in something that no one will be interested in.
In high school (at least mine), the number of people worth talking to about computers/programming/open-source is exactly two.
They do indeed exist, just very, very rarely. You either are not looking (you can't see them from behind that monitor!) or you just haven't met enough girls. But, just to add to the pile of proof, I present to you our resident geek girl, who indeed:
t 2003/DSC01939
-Is much less of a pain then "normal" girls
-Is very low maintainance
-Doesnt ask stupid questiong
-Isnt girly to the point of annoyance, but is still feminine enough to be attractive
And the proof: http://alpha39.servehttp.com:8000/gallery/geekfes
Theres more geek girls then you think out there, but some of them are hard to find because they don't proudly wave a flag of geekyness as we guys do. Some "normal" girls are even geek girls in disguise (I've found a few), until you get to know them! Try it!
(Or if all else fails, just get a normal girl and slowly turn her geeky!)
Or just reading everyone's documents folders using Netscape and file:/// URLs to bypass At Ease?
*sigh* Those where the days...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Personally, I found just about everything in HS a big waste of time, mainly due to the other students who almost always succeeded in wrecking anything that could even be remotely fun or interesting. I'm not bitter
I suggest finding your local Linux Users Group and if it looks promising, see if you can put up a flier or two at the school about it.
I've done something similar.
:-)
:-)
And believe it or not, 8 years later, it is still on my resume and I still talk about that kind of stuff during client meetings and interviews. Call me stupid, but showing this kind of leadership as of 8 years ago helps to establish the character profile very nicely.
Starting a club wasn't too difficult. I had the expertise to bring a bunch of IBM PS/2 computers that were gathering dust back to life. I am not the type who asks permission to do that kind of stuff. After that, I evaluated and got the school to pay for some fun educational shareware. Copied nearly-dead Apple IIe boot diskettes etc.
I had 17 members by the time I left that school. Not too bad for 8 months of work.
At a different school, I was very much in heaven. My high school teaches a 4-year course in electronics, in case you wondered why. Anyway, I took over network operations, built two labs from scratch under a paid internship, got my early Novell 4.11 exposure, and later got an unsolicited job offer through my high school principal to work for his friend and manage that environment. Running a 250-node Novell 4.11 network on cheap non-compliant high school hardware is not the easiest thing in the world. I organized a team of people to do field service all over the campus, and by the time we were juniors, we weren't even in classes sometimes.
I got thrown out of a graphic design class once for complaining about Mac keyboards hurting my hands. The teacher said I knew nothing about computers. I didn't argue, though I was working as a Excel 5 for Mac consultant for a real estate company. Then I simply disconnected her lab's Ethernet drop from my switch. She got told to talk to me about her network problems. Needless to say, it was quite a hilarious scene.
Anyway, here is how to start a club quick and easy.
1. You already know some geeks in school, so don't worry about announcing things. Don't be discouraged if only 2 or 3 of you start things. Word of mouth will help you expand initially, don't worry about getting external members. That will simply dillute things in early stages.
2. Learn how to run meetings. That is, not just the structure, but how to keep them interesting. At my meetings, for example, we shared cool tips and evaluated a bunch of stuff to later consider as cirriculum-enhancing material. The meetings need to have an agenda, a leader, and a firm termination time. 60-90 minutes works best.
3. Build the core of the club. It only takes 3 motivated people. That's the magic number. Not everyone will want to be in the core, but you'll be good friends with most of the inner circle.
4. Once you have some structure and membership in place, see if you can expand. For example, at that point you can confidently ask to be allocated a slot of time on school's computer lab equipment. It would help to have a teacher sponsor that request. Before proceeding with formal stuff, however, please take the time to draft some guidelines for the club, especially when it comes to resolving personal differences. Be sure to include games in the charter of the club, so as to not have to deal with that issue later. Everyone loves games
5. Holding training sessions is an excellent source for new members recruitment. There is nothing wrong with teaching some students the basics of Internet research beyond Google. Teaching a class on basics of DOS or UNIX is another way, but it's far more involved. I've done it, but it's a difficult job. Organizing a LAN party can be fun, and some of the older games will run very nicely on your school's hardware. Keep violent games to a minimum, however, as that may reduce your credibility in the eyes of administration.
Running a club can be a lot of fun. Keep your members interested, and you'll be very successful. You can reach me through my website, if you'd like some help.
Good luck!
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
...if you get a divorce some day.
I arranged it through my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher. She negotiated with the HS Computer instructor to allow us to use the computer, supervised by her, on Tuesday afternoons. Several of the HS students hung around to tutor us little Jr.High kids. All in all it was a wonderful experience. I am working full time in the industry now and also pursuing a PhD in CIS. My brother is also working full-time in the industry. All in all I think it worked quite well.
Math teachers are usually supportive of such efforts, especially if you can link the programming back to the math class.
I wish you well in your efforts. I certainly benefitted from starting the club at my Jr.High back in the 70's.
A little history for the curious
Back in the late 1970's my high school had a DEC PDP-8e on which students were being taught FORTRAN-69, BASIC, and FOCAL (A DEC proprietary language that was actually pretty cool for the 1970's). We had punch card readers and paper tape punches.
This was the beginning of the Melrose (MA) Jr High School Computer Club. Within a month we had a waiting list of students wanting to join (there were limited teletype terminals available).
1) It wouldn't hurt to have the meeting where there are some computers. :) This can be at school or somebody's house. If it's at school you'll probably need permission of one of the Computer teachers -- shouldn't be too hard to get.
But on the other hand, the first meeting might also be just a brainstorming session, no computers required -- decide what you and the others want to have the club do, pick a teacher to target as advisor, maybe write up a simple proposal ("We think there should be a computer club because... and it will do X, Y, and Z... and it won't cost the school a penny" -- be sure to add that last point. :) )
2) Talk it up among your friends and have them do the same. If you want to retain some control, have the meeting with people you know; if you want a bigger club, paper the hallways with notices about the first meeting and try to avoid conflicts in time with (say) Chess Club meetings. :)
Just Do It isn't such a bad slogan.
Yeah, I'm an IB freshmen at Deerfield Beach High, FL. It's the ghetto school of all ghetto schools. I'm going to try to start a computer club next year. As per testing out... we have Bio, Chem, Physics, eng, Spanish, French, Japanese, Soc Anthrop, History, Art, and Drama. Nevermind the cool CS stuff.... We had psychology, but the teacher stunk and most of the students flunked the IB tests, so they dropped it. I doubt the school would give us any money for my future club.
This should not be too hard. I suggest you 1. Find out if you need a faculty sponsor.
2. If you do, find the most computer-fanatic teacher you can and draft him/her.
3. Poke around to find three other people with similar interests and draft them too.
4. Kinko's and Staples both let their local owners decide what kind of philanthropy to do. See if the ones closest to you will "sponsor" you with equipment or printer cartridges/paper or other stuff in exchange for acknowledgement.
5. (alternatively) Find out where in the school district they need the most tech help and talk to the principal of that school about helping - Draft them as advocate then work back to the other steps.
22:25 1/5/2546
...
...
... they go to school, because they have to. like going to
... maybe i'm a pour soul, but my first was paid (and i was pissed) ...
now.
your class-mates are a few steps away. do they help?
if not, why not?
- not interessed ?
- no idee how it works?
don't waste your time.
people who are interessed, connect on-line anyway.
i don't want to say don't try it. try it!
just, you're (i imagine) so interessed, but don't think your class mates
or your peeres (going to work) are
i will tell you how much work i put in at highschool and nothing
ever came back, i mean this on a social level.
i learnd alot though
a boring work (to make money, e.g. eat).
high-school is such a small world.
so do it for yourself, don't do it for your class-mates. you learn
something, they don't. the teachers don't have to know ; )
as for chicks
and it wasn't bad. i imagine she knew way more anyway
imagine: awkward in bed, she asking what to do and you have no clue either...
-
the way you see the world, doesn't necesserly mean it's the way
they see the world...
.
buy a guitar and learn to roll your own cigarettes instead. In 4 years, you'll thank me.
I did this back in 1997 at my high school:
- Get a copy of an existing club's constitution and modify it to suit your club's needs.
- Find a faculty sponsor.
- Take your completed constitution to the principal and propose your new club.
Fortunately, our club's sponsor ran our only computer lab and we were able to hold our meetings there.
You shouldn't need money to start the club, and you can always find ways to raise money afterwards. You will find that many organizations are willing to donate their old computers to your club. We once got computers so old that we held a "computer bashing" booth at the school carnival.
-- David Hudgens
I was the president of the computer club in my high school. It never went well. Of course, there weren't many people IN my high school. We never seemed to accomplish anything we intended to accomplish. It kind of sucked, but it was fun getting together and watching All Your Base or other such things.
;-)
Just wait till college, then you'll find yourself pleasantly satisfied.
First off, debaters debate other schools. In effect, they are like a sports team. I don't think you can compare a debate 'club' to a computer club.
:) What advisor will want that on their ass?
Also, a computer club with no definite goal is just a bunch of people with excessive computer knowledge or experience. The club will probably end up a huge LAN gaming party
I have to agree with some other poster--Computer clubs made sense years ago, but not anymore. Even an Athletics club, when you already have a dozen high school sports, would make more sense.
I guess the Computer Club would be the generic name, but you will need a common theme to keep the students coming back... Sadly, this will end up probably being COMPUTER GAMES.
Cover your eyes and click this link!