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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 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.
...
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!
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
Sometimes there are fringe benefits to starting a club: I was a founder of the Surf Nazis Must Die club in university because the President wanted the free photocopies. The only meeting we ever had was to distribute the photocopy cards...
that reminds me of a story about how for 10 years, two of the science teachers at my HS only posted the pictures of women in physics/chemistry/math events around the halls, and other school publications. after a few years of this, they noticed the rate of women signing up for physics/chemistry/math went from 10% to 50% This kind of promotion would be great for a computer club.. droping the attitude that gender has anything to do with using computers..
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.
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 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
Ugly truths hurt. I don't think it's sexist to say that males and females view computers differently. Males see a toy, females see a tool.
A generalization, certainly, but not overbroad, methinks.
On the other hand, it could be that society simply cultivates this view. If our friend encourages those of the female persuasion to attend his club, say, by not letting the club become a weekly lan party (cool as that may be), he may actually succeed in introducing some chicks to Linux. Which would definitely be damned smooth and sexy.
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 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.
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...
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.
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."
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.
First, I'm just barely married... 15 days. Second, it took me 27 years to get that way (ok, 11 years from first date to marriage, with 4 guys between first and last bf). Third, some girls like dating geeks for the percieved cash appeal, the pity-date, or the "I can clean this one up and keep him" appeal.
Yeah, it's fairly easy for geek chicks to meet geek guys and not so much vice versa -- probably because of the huge male:female ratio, and the fact that geeks who leave their houses are like moles in the sunshine, squinting, wandering aimlessly. :P
It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable. It's a lot wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
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
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.
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.