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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 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"
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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.
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).
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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!
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.
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
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.
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 ?
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!
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
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.
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.
Have you ever read this site before?? The mostly male demographic that posts here use their computers as tools all the time. They use it to save money and make things easier, i.e. making a home PVR. They custom tailor OS's to do things they need, to make personal or buisness easier and more efficient. While to you this may seem like a toy, in reality it takes a lot of brains. And i don't know what girls you are talking about, but 99% of the ones i know use the computer only for AOL and checking email without any caring about the innner workings. While I may be bias due to the fact that I am an engineer and realize the untapped power computers hold, i may have taken extra offense to this comment. But going to an engineering school and having clases with 50 people in it, and not one girl, I think it is a safe assumption to say most women do not consider their computers a tool, but a fun escape for a few minutes and quick way to chat with some friends. Just my 2 cents.
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.
(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]
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
Note that I wrote MOST not all. I actually know two "remember to close your mouth" gorgeous girls that are CS majors. Both of them are a rather pain to deal with (usually every bit as bad mood as their male fellows). As to negotiating about movies, I don't really give a shit about movies. If I really want to see one (i.e. Matrix Reloaded), I'll go on my own anyway, I don't want anyone to bother me. Generally, I don't think it's so much being geek that makes it impossible to get girls (/boys) but much more the social anxiety that very often comes with it (or maybe it is even responsible resp, required to become a geek in first place. I'm not psy major so I don't really have a clue). Matching interests help in a long term relationship but in general, I've found that if se x is the only thing you care for, they don't help at all. If you don't share much, it's much more probable you end up just fucking each others brains out since you don't have anything worse to do... And as I'm bored rather quickly, I'm probably not the material it takes for long term relationships anyway.
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.
It's certainly not as if we can't have both. I'm a geek, I'm a crypo geek, I'm a dance geek, I take things apart, I cook, I build thing, I sew, I bike , I read -- I'm human.
Sometimes I wear skirts (though I only wear heels for ballroom dance -- I'm 5'9"). They can be comfortable, and it's nice to be put-together, it doesn't really take much effort at all. Note that this comes from someone who used to wear all black because it always matched.
There's no contradiction here, and that I like my clothes not to clash says absolutely nothing about the staus of my screwdriver knowledge or skill. I am who I am, as well. I'm a geek, I'm a woman, but most importantly I'm a person.
Lea
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
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.
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
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