LAN Party at a High School?

Coolnat2004 asks: "I'm a high school student and a member of our technology group. Our school needs extra money for our technology, and I thought that a LAN party would be an effective, and exciting, solution. How can we make a great LAN party with the supplies at hand and make a profit while doing it? We have a network, but not a large enough room with enough ports. We're most likely going to create a detached network for the party, but don't know how to set it up because we have limited supplies. I guess we could seek a sponsorship from a local company, but that is unlikely to happen. Any suggestions on network layout, power layout, and general party to-do's?"

Comments

Consider It Carefully

[American AC in Paris]

Well, unless you can get your hands on the necessary hardware and space, you're not going to be able to pull this one off. For a LAN party of any significant size, you're going to need large amounts of cabling, a solid power source, better-than-consumer-grade LAN hardware, folding chairs/tables, food, and a dedicated security team. You might consider contacting your local conference center, as they may have the capacity for such an event, because odds are that your school isn't really equipped to handle such a thing--even the power requirements would be tricky for your typical high school.

Consider, too, that a LAN party can be a logistical nightmare; Google around and check out some of the horror stories out there about mid/large-scale LAN parties that have gone horribly awry due to a lack of planning. Consider that the onus of "getting it done right" will fall squarely on your shoulders, and that you'll need to be prepared to handle such things as n00bs with viruses, jerks with aimbots, kleptomaniacs with quick fingers, and chest-beaters who aren't afraid to let the bloodletting spill over into Real Life. Consider, too, that you'll need to coordinate with folks at your school in advance to decide on which games they're willing to let you all play. Finally, understand that you're not likely to have a single second to sit down and actually play if you're the organizer. You'll be busy days in advance and hours after the last person has gone home.

Seriously--you may want to look at candy bars and car washes if your goal is to raise money. LAN parties are neither easy nor lucrative for the small operator.

Re:Consider It Carefully

[TopShelf]

Bah - you complicate the issue too much. There's only one thing you truly need to make this a success:

Cheerleaders.

Seriously, an easy way to raise $$$ is by selling t-shirts. Come up with a clever design, and you can easily get people to pay $10 apiece for something that costs less than half that to procure. When I was in high school a group I belonged to did that and we raised well over $2000 in just a couple weekends...

Re:Consider It Carefully

[ReverendRyan]

This is exactally the point I was going to bring up. I once held a LAN at my former school district's central office which had large rooms they will rent to anyone (for a nice fee). They almost didn't rent the room to me (as a paying adult) because of those very same fears (none of it happened, tho, and the party was a great success).

There's no WAY you'll be allowed to play games like CS, Quake, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, etc. at school, especially as a school-related fundraiser.

Your best bet would be to hold the LANs outside of school completely and simply donate the profits (which will be small - LANS are expensive when they get big) to your school.

Sponsors are easy

[Pacifix]

Call up the local mom and pop computer hardware store and ask to use their floor model routers and to donate a spool of ethernet cable, then let them plaster the place with fliers. Take personal responsibility for the borrowed hardware. Treat it well and return it. Repeat.

Why not sponsership?

[BigZaphod]

I don't see why local sponsorship would be unlikely. Ever try, ya know, asking? When I was in high school we had a few projects that required some money (including racing an all-electric vehicle). It took some doing, but when you start asking around, like, "where does your dad work?" and such, you inevitably find that someone's dad or mom is some executive somewhere local and or close to the executive or close enough that an inquiry from them will land the school a nice chunk of money.

We got a few hundred dollars as well as actual materials donated in exchange for stickers on our car. I'm sure you could do something similar. Make it known via local radio stations and you'll get companies more than willing to sign up. Spin it as something safe and entertaining for area teens to do on a saturday night (or whatever) and you might even get some TV time out of it. It doesn't take much. Just a phone call or two to a TV station and radio station and newspaper. They love local interest student-run things. Makes for great fluff stories. It is easier to get attention for this kind of thing than you might expect.

Don't forget software!

[latent_biologist]

If you're trying to do this on the cheap, Wolfenstein: Enemey Territory is great. Free to download, & the hardware requirements aren't all that outrageous if your computer is 3yrs old. Over the last couple of years, the personal LANs i've attended always seem to come back to this old standby. If ET's not your flavor of carnage, there's a listing of free games that was mentioned on /. that I can't seem to find the URL for...(anyone?)

From prior experience

[btornado]

I atttended a LAN party at our crosstown rival's high school once, so I feel obliged to share my experience.

LAN parties at schools are risky because they are government buildings and you're basically leaching off their supplies and resources. Take for granted what you are offered. The whole trick to getting our LAN party off the ground was that the person who organized it had a friendly relationship with the head of technology at the school. You state that you're in a technology group, so that's a start. If it's a school sponsored group, that's even better.

If administration gives you the go-ahead, the next step might be sponsorship from a faculty member. School administration will probably be hesitent about a bunch of high school kids in the building after hours, so a faculty member with them to look after them will usually calm their nerves. If your group is sponsored, the leader of your group might be a good choice.

Chances are you'll want to bring your own computers because school computers are generally locked down and don't have the horsepower for games. If you're placed in a room that has Ethernet jacks, you might be tempted to just plug all the computers into that. I thought about doing that at ours, but I just plugged one cable into a wall jack for uplink to the Internet.

For network topology, we just had a hub and everyone plugged into that, and then we had one cable plugged into a wall port providing Ethernet. I don't think we told anyone about the uplink, but it worked fine.

We played WarCraft III the entire night because we were asked not to play violent games (Quake III and the like). Getting people to attend can be a challenge, but post flyers and tell your friends. Depending on who you hang out with, you may or may not draw a croud. In our case, we had about 10 people show up.

Easy

[vasqzr]

I'd suggest using the cafeteria. Plenty of electrical power, and you probably have tables in there already.

Go to Lowes/Home Depot, buy a box or two of CAT5 cable. Have some students make the ends. Get a couple of cheap switches. Small companies like mine throw them out all the time. In the last year I've thrown out 2 100MB hubs, 5 10MB hubs, and 2 100MB switches.

You're just running games so you're not going to saturate them.

We did this at a high school I previously worked at, and it went pretty well. We used all the old networking equipment the school used to run on, and now they just use it in the 'student lab' with old computers and other things for computer class kids to play with.