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Ideas for High School Computer Club Activities?
angryLNX asks: "This year, my high school's computer club started running out of project ideas and fun things to do as a club. Over the years, we have done the website, the Linux box and the TV announcement system. Does anyone have any ideas for projects or activities which would be worthwhile? Any good or bad experiences with certain high school computer clubs? Since we're in Connecticut, maybe it would be fun to attend a certain conference in New York?"
... hacking into the system and changing the grades for those who can cough up the dough?
"Derp de derp."
When I was in high school, the main activities of the Computer Club were probably best categorized as "Offsite Archival Preservation."
Um, well, you're in a High School Computer Club. I'm guessing that you don't get laid all that often. And I'm guessing that you'd like to get laid, you just lack the, er, social skills. If your club buys a RealDoll and adds a skeletal robot to it, then implements a functional AI system using, I dunno, Lisp or something, then you'll all be able to get laid, and learn about computer stuff at the same time. Well, not the exact same time, but you know what I mean. You can program her to do all sorts of fun things. Hell, she's got three holes! That leaves open the possibility for Computer Club Gangbangs!
Um, is your club looking for new members?
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
when I was in high school, porn and hacking into other people's computers was top priority.
We also talked about converting binary and hexadecimal a few times, but mostly it was all about the vaginas and the thievery.
Say that would make a great punk band name: Vaginas and Thievery.
Teach them how to make a cdr spark up! Just throw a cdr in the microwave for 3 seconds. Don't do it for five or you'll be smelling some awful fumes!
...two words: LAN party! 'Nuff said?
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
If so, you might want to consider having them put together a simple game. The important thing is not to be overly ambitious (puzzle games or simple 2d shooters fit this well). The non-programmers can work on art, design, and music.
I thought setting up and playing Massive Lan Games was the only legitimate activity for a Computer Club... am I wrong?
Also Chemistry Club is for blowing things up and making nitrogen cooled Bongs!
Maybe you could set up a blogging system for students? I also recommend that you re-design your website using one of any popular PHP/MySQL portal systems. May I suggest Geeklog.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You could create so called "demos" which requires a bit of everything, programming, graphics and music. More information can be found here. There is already a lot of them out there from C64, Amiga, texas instument calculator demos and PC demos, most of them can be found here. They are useless but then again fun to make :)
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I read that three times before I realized I was reading it wrong. I thought it said
Ideas for High School Computer Cult Activities?
the Computer Club currently seems to be split into two groups. One group mostly plays multiplayer games such as Tribes, while the other group embarks on lessons on how to use our server, as well as basic tutorials in programming languages we use such as PHP.
That's basically how it is at my school as well. Our computer club is mainly kids who play video games, but thanks to our great technology department we know have something made for the other type. We call it St. Paul's Technical Services, St. Paul's being the school and technical services being what we offer. The school has a laptop program, and with a few hundred machines being on campus problems arise. Mainly we trouble-shoot Windows programs and the like, but from time to time we deal with hardware too. This (2002-2003) year was our first, so it was all kind of "unplanned". But next year is looking much better.
Carpe meam simiam!
High school computer clubs are for faciliting data input and output (i.e.: trading DIVX and mp3).
The chemistry clubs are for explosions, intoxication from vapors, and setting flourescent lights on the ceiling on fire
The exchange student club is for trying to have sex with the Italians
The economics club is for insider trading training.
The Key Club is for trying to gain illicent access to the building after hours.
The Chess Club is for dropping by and seeing if anyone looks like Milhouse.
"Hack the Planet!"
Just a suggestion.
Better make that 6 holes after ol' Poindexter decided to put it in the battle bots arena against Die Sector.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If you all use PCs, then make the switch to Macs. If you use Macs, then make the switch to PCs. Or switch to something else like Linux, BeOS, or OS/2 and record the sociological effects on the members of your club. Are they happy? Sad? Are any of the members expressing rage while trying to get USB to work in a certain Linux distro across different logic board types?
Could make an interesting doctoral thesis for that rare Anthropology/Computer Science double-major out there.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Maybe you could upgrade your site so it'll survive a slashdotting?
Why don't you take a look at one of the Mozilla bugs with large community interest (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16399 3 /.) and try to fix them. Some of the are enhancement requests and they would maky a nice Mozilla Firebird or Mozilla Thunderbird extension.
- sorry I am not linking because bugzilla refuses direct links from
For example, some people even pledged money to fix the controversial http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429 (option to put signature above the quoted text in mailnews). The devs refuse to fix it so it's perfect for an extension.
Back in the day, we had a computer and robotics club. We met after school and built interface boards so we could control a set of stepper motors using either an apple IIe, an old mac quadra, or a commodore 64.
So these old boxes aren't around anymore, but the element of controlling robots with computer programs is essential experience for the high school computer geek. Check out the Lego Mindstorms stuff and give the club members a competition or goal...When I was in school we built a machine and programmed a computer that could open a Master lock without knowing the combination! (no, we didn't iterate through all possible combinations, either)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
Computers for computers' sake, while educational, can be hard to get excited about. Find out what the other clubs are doing, and see if any of them have projects or programs which have need of your skills. Do you have a rocketry club? Maybe they need telemetry; there have been several Linux-based model rocketry setups displayed here on /. as well as around the web. Is there a bicycling or cross-country running group? See if they use GPS, and if they'd like to have a central system to keep track of runs/rides! Perhaps implement a music score archive webserver for the band! Be entrepreneurial. The most fun and useful computer projects have come about to solve problems, even if the problem in question isn't that practical.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
these are things that shouldn't be too hard to implement (eg: using the matrix formulation for fully connected backpropagation networks rather than the graph model) and yet have large toy value:
;-)) --- intel's opencv library (google for it) has all sorts of cool demos. possible applications: motion detection, object detection and recognition, maybe even face recognition?
1) acquire a cheap webcam (i recommend the not-so-cheap route of firewire + an orange micro ibot) and use it to do something neat (this is what i do for a living
2) playing with neural networks (personally, i recommend implementing your own neural network package and then using it to solve some kind of problem --- maybe use it together with #1 to recognize things?)
3) robots (www.kipr.org has a boatload of info on this, as well as how to get starter kits)
4) ???
if you'd like help with #1 or #2, give me a yell and i'll do what i can to help (i have a linux toolkit that makes talking to firewire cameras a reasonably pleasant task)
How about getting some older (donated) PCs and building a Beowulf Cluster? This incorporates hardware, software, networking, and possibly some cool programming projects.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Get out to the elementary/middle schools. The technology education they are getting is a joke and so MS centric many will never be functional without Uncle Bill's CrackOS. Show them OpenOffice, teach kids HTML without using MSWord, code up a (secured) gradebook app or homework list in PHP on Apache/MySQL for the teacher/parents to view. When they get advanced, show the kids how to program in ECMAScript, PHP, Perl, or C. Hold a community education night to teach adults how to use a computer effectively. There is plenty of things you can do to help out, just poke around and see what the Elementary teachers are screwing up.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Every high school club needs to do it. It cannot be bypassed, or you will forever regret it.
Model the school grounds in some popular first-person shooter. Extra points for accurately recreating textures. And if you're really socially challenged, custom player and enemy models are a nice touch.
Just don't mention it to anyone who seems idiotic and paranoid, they won't like the idea of schoolkids hunting each other through classrooms and firing a full rocket spread down the hall.
...
make some art, do something unique, do something original. make it worth the /.ing you will receive.
I want 2D games back.
One or two tables, one to three trains per table, one computer per table controlling the trains and switches, and a bunch of machines for developing the code. It'll give the keeners a leg up on the university-level real-time course, perhaps some insight into concurrency, and demonstrate the destructive potential of bugs. No, I didn't go to MIT. But I am grateful for the influence of their Tech Model Railroad Club.
The Seventh Rule: Take others more seriously than yourself, particularly when you are leading them.
And turn the computers into electronic bongs. Then find some cheerleaders and let the panties fly!
Have your school sign up with the American Computer Science League (ACSL). Very fun and competitive.
www.acsl.org
Build Blinkenlights on your school building or a nearby tower of your choice. The Chaos Computer Club did it, why not YOU? (The tools are GPL)
sulli
RTFJ.
Any good or bad experiences with certain high school computer clubs
:( I was left to teach myself any area of computers. They called the bitch a technology coordinator, but her most proficient technology skill was dialing the tech services to come in and fix the "computers" because the "internet isn't working". Computer club? My school was a private one and quite prone to "giving themselves awards" and "giving speeches about their greatness" for often then creating anything useful. To actually organize a functioning group must seem foreign and very public schoolish to them. That is my BAD HIGH SCHOOL COMPUTER CLUB EXPERIENCE.
Bad experiences? My high school's computer setup consisted of a psychopathic "technology coordinator" who wasted large amounts of money leasing imacs for the library that crashed constantly. You were restricted from visiting any sites other than those that were considered school-related (in which of course, they always made the right calls when they suspend your account). A programming lab? Using codewarrior on even more outdated macs. They make us waste a semester on TRUEBASIC
I run YorkCC, a computer club for a high school in Illinois. Many of the students in the club are working on everything from website programming to building their own PCs. We mainly hang out on IRC and discuss what we're working on there.
Games? Why not download the source to Quake2 and play with the code? The other fun part comes in compiling and playing your version. Making mods for it is was also suggested, why not have two groups? One in charge of the game and the other of the mod?
Programming? If you're not interested in programming games, then look through the source of another program that might be of interest.
Now if programming isn't what you're looking for... then maybe helping your school migrate to OpenOffice? Get rid of the Office lincense will reduce the cost to the school, so it might be worth it. Then plan 2 would be to migrate them to Linux! With both these projects it will require you to provide some training and support. (Both good resume keywords for when you eventually reach the job market.) Maybe take a look at the LTSP and see if you're be interested in that.
There are SOOO many things to do, it's just a matter of finding something that you and the rest of the CC is interested in. It looked like you'd already worked on a few good ones.
Good luck!
-P
If you get them hooked onto quake2 for instance, and make them develop maps and skins and play the game for the last 10 minutes of the class, interest in computers 3d models and programming will spike. A kids interest of games should be utilized and not sidelined.
Another geekmaker is to have SOC chips control motors, or have network connectors. For instance some System On Chips have a x86 core and come with at least one ethernet interface. When bought in bulk theyre cheap and on proper boards, kids dont need to know pinouts, ROM programming and the likes, just how to transfer data to the on board flash. Others come with analog outputs, which is cool with electronic muscles, magnets, motors etc. The smart ones will soon build little robots and from then on, expect the geek half of the class to get hooked.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
People like things to be customized and personalized. A cool project I'd like to see is a distro-creation kit for schools that might include a distro like Knoppix customized with:
- splash screens with school logo
- school colors as appropriate
- directory (if your school permits such, make sure all students with listed numbers are fully aware of their inclusion in advance)
- likewise, yearbook pictures or just some fun snapshots
- first-person-shooter with layout of your school. (But no weapons! Just call it a 3D tour, ok?)
- Mozilla / other browsers with useful-to-students links
- a lot of educational software
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Every good club should dedicate part of their time to working on or promoting issues that matter to them. Even if the club is a science club, there are still policies and laws that effect your ability to do research, experiments, projects, etc. Taking a stand on an issue or raising a new issue does three things:
1. It keeps your senators and reps informed (there's strength in numbers) let's them know that you're a group that they speak for. They may even invite you to sit-in on hearings or attend sessions on certain education or computer issues.
2. It's a good lesson in civics that college admission offices take into account.
3. Get involved in your local schoolboard! Most of the district schoolboard reps in my area wanted to see every program but "Readin', Writin' and 'Rhythmatic" dissolved to save tax dollars for the more important programs like football and baseball.
I would make it the responsibility of one member, maybe two, perhaps the club's president or secretary to find an issue or two that the other members can write letters (and email) directly to senators and reps about.
I would also suggest setting aside one meeting to pick an issue that you're going to fight for and then make a plan to write letters, make a website, conduct polls, and then see how computer science can fit into your gameplan. From then on, make the issue a background thing as you do your regular projects, but do a little work on it every week.
This doesn't have to be a national thing either. Again, making your voices heard at the state level or local schoolboard level is also extremely important - affecting change at that level direcly impacts you, your classmates, the teachers who support you, and also looks good to college admission offices.
seriously.
please don't feed the trolls...
Create a Game Server out of that Linux box you created and then set up a local area network to connect to that server. Then have a party and kill people. One project you can do before that is build your own custom map together and then you can all play it together at the party.
Teaches you Server management, Networking, Building things as a team and being social.
1. Teach six year old to program in C and ECMAScript ...
2. Hire them out as cheap labor to fortune 500 companies.
3.
4. Profit!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
At YAPC::Europe (Amsterdam) in 2001, vroom of perlmonk's fame appeared and we took the place by storm. Bumped into a 17 yr old NL hacker (of US parentage) we knew from perlmonks & IRC. He drank too much, missed his last train and ended up crashing on the floor of my house (45 min away from A'dam, in the wrong direction). The next day he was nearly taken to Belgium to continue to the drunken debauchery, except his girlish whining meant he got left at the first train station to find his way home.
That, my friend, is what I wish I had done in high school.
And then there was the time at HAL2001 (also in NL) where the sys admin of sealand enjoyed some very wacky substances and his antics amused us all. But, that is another tale.
... you don't talk about computer club!!
An easy project would be to get involved in one of the Open source Content Management Systems such as xaraya and develop a school oriented extension.
You could then use it for your own site. It's in php and can take subproject with different skill sets (somebody less programming oriented could easily develop custom themes which require not much more than html knowledge).
Many teenagers have never seen a computer made before the Win95 age, and know even less about computers back then. Have an old-computers day, where people can bring in their old Atari STs, Amigas, Win3.1 486s, BBCs, AppleIIs, C64s, BBCs, Dos games, Archimedes, Classic Macs, Risc PCs, Spectrums, etc.
They'll be fascinated so long as they aren't 'cool tough'-CounterStrike-playing types
Why not volunteer to help out the IT staff & school district, as mentioned in this other /. story?
Yes, I myself am in this club, and frankly, we have nothing to do. Our advisor himself is a complete idiot who feels the need to use key phrases and buzzwords to make up for what he doesn't understand. I'm not even sure why he's the advisor at all. What we need is a good project that would confuse him and keep him quiet, while we just go about doing it.
> Does anyone have any ideas for projects or activities which would be worthwhile?
Change the name of the club, hide the computers away, clean up the place, and invite some girls over.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you use your casemodded C=64 and a scanner to create your own woman who looks suspiciously like Kelly LeBrock, *don't* forget the doll.
... are filing lawsuits.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
play lan games of counterstrike using the school's computers and network.
Repeal the DMCA!
Why not organize a dance? Use project management and collaboration software to plan and assign tasks, MP3 software and lpd to play the music (which is all eleet dance/techno streaming off the Net, of course), PIC microcontrollers and lasers mounted on swervos for the light show, and spam to announce it? You could geek out AND meet c00l chicks, all at the same time! W00t!
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
We had a computer club back in high school for about 3 months. The problem was that we needed a teacher to support it and she would never show up. It was more of a programming club than anything. We sorta setup a linux box but didn't have any use for it until we became interested in MOOs. They're essentially MUDs that you can program easily and in the game (Mud Object Oriented). It was a lot of fun but we showed up after spring break only to find the linux box gone with the power cord still plugged into the wall. ;-) It was a lot of fun though up until that point...
The administration didn't really like what they didn't understand. Stupid humans
Someone wants to make their computer club better and wants help - 70 Slashdot readers reply. Someone wants to bitch and moan about their job and threaten to walk out - 1000 responses. That's sad.
Here is some crap we did:
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
Show them how to multi-task in DOS using DesqView, and setup a BBS with a 2400bps modem. Use Norton Commander to manage files. And QBasic is cool too.
We've started a local Linux User Group here are some of the ideas we came up with, some of them may be of use:
1) Talks, lots of talks from outside people. Try your local ISPs, Sun, IBM etc. Not only will they talk about cool stuff but they might bring stuff to take away.
2) Security. Show the group how to setup a firewall then how to secure their desktop boxes.
3) Dual-head systems. Not everyone has two monitors, setup a dual-head system just for the fun of it.
4) Not everyone has broadband. Download a set of each Linux distribution for use by the members.
5) Visits to cool places. Your local ISP, places that have some 'Big Iron' installations.
6) If there are any hard-core Linux hackers you could always build your own distro. It's a great way of understanding the boot process.
7) Don't forget the newbie stuff, show how to set systems up, share files, share passwords between machines.
Hope these ideas help
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
No different from a corporation, schools often have undertakings that are caught up in precedent and convention.
If your school has a newspaper, consider showing them how to set up Linux file server or some story-typing / editing stations.
If they have an advertising crew, show them that Gnumeric and Open Office offer high-quality, free spreadsheets. (And if they're pretty simple, there should be no probs with converting to / from Excel format.)
Graphics: there are decent-enough vector graphics now (Carbon14 is one) and excellent image-retouching programs (GIMP, Image Magick), available built into most distros and downloadable for others.
Web browsing: School newspapers often use the Web for research, and for other purposes when they're not "working." Show them with a 5-minute demo that with Mozilla they can forget most popup ads, open tabs for organization, bookmark groups of tabs for a useful start-up state, search using keywords, etc.
If they can afford it in the first place, they probably are stuck on a DTP program like Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, etc: that's OK, and hard to replace with Free software right now. The fantastic Scribus is getting better and better, though.
Still, you can show them that a cheap, even discarded computer can be a useful and reliable adjunct for many *other* purposes when set up with Linux. (Which lets you save the DTP machine(s) for the ones using it for that purpose.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Apply for a grant from the school district or any "supporting organizations" for stuff that you can use as a "service project". For example, my computer club (I'm a sophomore) just finished a digital archive of the old school using a state-of-the-art digital camera provided by a grant. We're now putting together a UI, and we're going to burn it on a CD for alumni. It helped that the building was about to be torn down. This created a lot of goodwill /w the admin, especially when we got a picture of a plaque they'd forgotten to save or get a picture of. Also, many schools have a program where you do a "Service Learning Project" with a teacher/sponsor - service to the community, then, senior year, if you have spent enough hours on it, do a project explaining what you learned. Then, you get a nice little note on your transcript that makes admissions officers swoon. My club got ourselves recognized as almost a class so we could do this, and any project we do that benefits the school somehow is counted (we have to have 10 hrs per year we attend the school).
Correction: I am my middle schools right now. I did our schools year book, and also set the new standards for our end of the year slide show- went from using powerpoint and a cd player to using imovie and quicktime with two canon mindv's. it has to do with computers, it is creative, it gets you actual praise, and it allows you freedom. reply for details.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
How bout a nice porn site... it's a fun project and really profitable too.
I love every bone in her body, especially mine!
A great project is an interactive CD-ROM 'yearbook' for the grad class.
...
They can do the video footage (few seconds of each grad saying hi), intro scenes into the school or on the grounds, a couple of small games, that can be played, some generic geek stuff (woo hoo) like multi-os platform stability (java based?)
ohhh, and you can sell the result to the grads. Way better than just a website (although you should put one up to market to the school), lots of content (use your imagination) and it can generate funds for that new server array for the computer class next year!
Cheers.
Work on an algorithm that will successfully land each of you dates for the prom?
One thing that can always make a useful project, and which you can make very personal to your team, as some kind of accesibility system. You must have some disabled people around - physical, visual, mental, whatever. And they are usually all slightly different. And specialise gear for the disabled is very, very expensive. So find someone in need of assistance a,d build something custom for them. Might be I/O devices customised to their needs - mouse replacements for different physical disabilities. Or a wheelchair mounted PC with GPS. Could you make a "navigate home" device for the wheelchair? Or a decent centralised lights-audio-curtains-TV controller for someone who can't move. Or.... But be driven by your local needs: have a real project with real success or falure, rather than a theoretical project for some hypothetical disabled person you don't know. reckon to hand over a finished, packaged, archived project at the end of the year.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.