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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!
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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.
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.
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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.
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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
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.
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.
By the way, you haven't seen my red Swingline lying around anywhere, have you?
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!
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
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!
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.
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.
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
I'd say you're definitely well-toasted.
...
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.
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
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".
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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 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.
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.)
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Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
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...
No. I believe you would have the world's first computer club (according to the US Patent search).
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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