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."

Comments

Hrmm.

[cybermace5]

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.

Re:Hrmm.

[Jubii]

Um... no, I think you're a little off base in your statement. The theme for a Computer Club is just what the name implies: a group of people interested in computers. Just like Debate Club, or any of the numerous other HS clubs, you get the people together based on similar interests, then your group can decide on and do various projects. You can do any of the projects you mentioned (aside from maybe gaming or dressing up in black suits) in your school computer club.

You're really missing the point of "clubs". You're examples of the refrigerator club and toaster club are completely rediculous because you're missing the idea of intrest. No one would make a toaster club as no one cares much about a toaster other than if it makes toast properly. Again interest will filter people out of your club. Sure even jocks use computers, but would they join a club based on that fact? Just because someone know how use a computer doesn't mean someone is likely to be interested in learning more about it.

To sum it all up I own a Mustang, but to me the car is an appliance like a toaster. Because of that I would not be interested in joing a Musang Owner's Club. However, some people are, that is why Mustang clubs exist. Me, I think they're a waste of time... computer time that is.

Whats the point of it?

[baronben]

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.

Mod parent up. Way up.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Our computer club ....

[Vilim]

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

Don't do it.

[mfh]

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.

Re:Not a good way to meet chicks..

[SuperQ]

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..

Dear me, what a negative bunch.

[kafka93]

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.

Computer clubs/etc in schools

[Marasmus]

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...) :)

I may be of help here...

[I kan Spl]

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 ;)...