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By Peter Henderson
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Teenager Patrick Tysell had his hands full last summer while teaching a class of Oakland, California ``misfits'' how to use computers. The machines didn't work, many were in pieces and the pupils were dropping key bits like hard drives on the floor.
That was part of the lesson plan.
What wasn't in the plan was that no one was interested in computers, although the 16-year-old student-instructor understood that, too.
``These were the 'misfits', talking in class and all,'' said Patrick, who had felt the same way about school, until he investigated the guts of a computer in a practical science project four years ago.
``This is not some class ending in 'ometry','' he said, explaining that a third of the summer school students he taught, under adult supervision, turned out to be good at computers, once they started touching parts and reconstituting old Apple Macintoshes.
``Kids that were failing classes ... you saw the little light bulb turn on in their heads,'' Patrick said. ``At the end of it, they were quiet, interested. The kids are like -- Wow! -- this is my first computer.''
Patrick Tysell is part of The Access 2 Technology Project, (http://www.a2t.org), a tiny Oakland non-profit organization that is taking a novel approach to getting kids into computers and computers into schools, using two main ideas.
The first idea is that discarded, donated equipment -- the kind many people might consider would make a great doorstop -- still has a lot of life in it. The second is that the scope and success of introducing computers in schools can increase exponentially if students take part in the process. ``If you can plug (a lamp) in an electrical outlet, you can plug in a hard drive,'' the teenaged instructor says.
Patrick learned how to ``FrankenMac,'' or patch together, a working machine from several old ones, and gain an understanding that there was nothing to be afraid of in dropping a few hard drives or frying a bit of memory in the process.
Access 2 Technology was incorporated as a non-profit organization a year ago, after operating in different forms since 1991, and has participated in about 10 projects in Oakland schools, building about 400 computers and finding new volunteers along the way. In fact, among the roughly 15 core volunteers, students outnumber adults.
``You meet kids who are really energetic, and you keep them,'' Patrick explains.
IT'S NOT JUST THE COMPUTERS
Renae Briggs, director of Access 2 Technology, says she has more old computers stored around town than she can handle, including a G3, Apple's second-line processor, which is the heart of most of its new laptop computers. The group prefers easy-to-use Macintoshes, and people are giving up perfectly good machines in order to get better ones.
``The name of the game isn't computers anymore,'' she said recently. ``It is the manpower.''
A2T, as she calls her group, has given equipment to a number of organizations but Briggs says she does not want to become simply a source of hardware.
``Giving the computer without the information to use it is not empowering,'' she maintained. ``The people have to be part of the solution.''
Briggs took a first step with her theory at Oakland's Lakeview Elementary School, (http://webtest.ousd.k12.ca.us/LAKEVIEW), which was trying to set up a computer lab with the help of a volunteer, said Principal Stanyan Vukovich. Progress was not as smooth as it might have been, before A2T arrived.
``The intentions were good. Dante said the road to hell was paved with good intentions,'' Vukovich joked. Briggs set up a lab with students, Patrick among them, from St. Paul's Episcopal School. Later, A2T returned with a project to teach Lakeview fourth and fifth graders how to clean and refurbish computers.
``These kids actually refurbished computers that went into classrooms. Before, we had two computers per classroom. Now we have three. That is a marketable skill,'' Vukovich said.
Charleen Calvert had a similar experience recently, when she became principal of Westlake Middle School in Oakland.
``I was looking at a school that was kind of in the Paleolithic Age of computers,'' she said. Now, ``we've gotten to the point where kids are taking them apart and putting them back together ... When something breaks, we do not call an eighth grader. But I think we are getting close.''
It turns out there are a lot of places that could use computers, if someone can just help them get going. Students are moving the original computer lab at Lakeview, which has been upgraded, to an area shelter that previously had no computers, Briggs said.
She said the experience with the early labs has helped the schools get grants and made them better computer buyers.
``If they spend $50,000 at a school when they don't know how to use computers, by the time they do know, the computers are out of date. Refurbished computers are not the answer, but they are a way to get going. If they start at this level, they can buy new products and know what they are getting,'' Briggs said. Lakeview got money by proving themselves good stewards.
The principals say they still need training for teachers in order to incorporate computers into the classroom. But Westlake is now out of the Paleolithic Age, and has a computer lab, which A2T helps run, dedicated to fixing machines, Calvert says. In fact, she sees computer repair as a way to deal with the problems of ultramodern life. Kids today simply don't get many chances to put their hands on things, to understand what makes the world tick.
``Networking is about more than computers,'' says Briggs, who hopes one day to put together a program that can be replicated.
Calvert agrees: ``When you ask a kid to look inside a computer, you might get them to look inside more.''
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