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Education Software Linux

Ideas for High School Computer Club Activities? 90

Posted by Cliff from the filling-the-pot-of-inspiration dept.
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?"
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Ideas for High School Computer Club Activities? More

Ideas for High School Computer Club Activities?

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  • How about... (Score:4, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:24PM (#6172288) Homepage Journal
    ... hacking into the system and changing the grades for those who can cough up the dough?

  • Club activities (Score:5, Funny)

    by JCMay ( 158033 ) <JeffMayNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:25PM (#6172300) Homepage
    When I was in high school, the main activities of the Computer Club were probably best categorized as "Offsite Archival Preservation."
  • 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?

  • Any programmers in the group? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lendrick ( 314723 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:32PM (#6172396) Homepage Journal
    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 [geeklog.net].

  • demos (Score:2, Informative)

    by termos ( 634980 )
    You could create so called "demos" which requires a bit of everything, programming, graphics and music. More information can be found here [oldskool.org]. 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 [pouet.net]. They are useless but then again fun to make :)
    • Good idea, but don't tell any demoscener that demos are useless ;). The learning effect by doing one in school can be quite steep.
      And an evening of "watching a demo, having a beer" (as the old saying goes) beats many other
      pastimes.
  • I read that three times before I realized I was reading it wrong. I thought it said

    Ideas for High School Computer Cult Activities?

  • Two Camps (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lowtekneq ( 469145 ) <lowtekneqNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:42PM (#6172517) Homepage
    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 [stpaulsmobile.net] 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.
    • so it was all kind of "unplanned".

      So is fixing all those broken laptops after they've been used as beer can coasters, date-rape defensive wepons, jizz-sheilds, cocaine cutting surfaces, skateboard substitutes, etc. *sigh* I know what you mean.

      Semper Ubi Sub Ubi "Always where under where." Dude, go commando whenever you can. Less Latin to worry about.
  • "Hack the Planet!"

    Just a suggestion.

  • Project idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by nycroft ( 653728 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:45PM (#6172548) Homepage
    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.
  • Maybe you could upgrade your site so it'll survive a slashdotting?

  • mozilla bugs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by an_mo ( 175299 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:52PM (#6172628) Journal
    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
    - sorry I am not linking because bugzilla refuses direct links from /.) and try to fix them. Some of the are enhancement requests and they would maky a nice Mozilla Firebird or Mozilla Thunderbird extension.

    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.

  • My old computer club (Score:2, Interesting)

    by roberto0 ( 242247 )
    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 [legomindstorms.com] stuff and give the club members a competition or goal...When I was in school we built a machine and progr

  • Try combining efforts with other clubs! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sierran ( 155611 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:55PM (#6172657)
    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.

    • 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 (Carbon1

  • a couple ideas (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blackcoot ( 124938 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:58PM (#6172688)
    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:

    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 ;-)) --- 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?

    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)
    • Great idea. I work with neural networks in robotics and it is some of the coolest stuff around. Especially when they are giving answers that you did not expect, but which make sense.
    • /me gives blackcoot a yell please email me with stuff on neural networks and how to program them... I have a webcam already, I want my computer to reconize me....
  • How about getting some older (donated) PCs and building a Beowulf Cluster? This incorporates hardware, software, networking, and possibly some cool programming projects.

  • Teach (Score:4, Informative)

    by bofkentucky ( 555107 ) <bofkentucky&gmail,com> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:17PM (#6172922) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • On a similar note, how about teaching at a local senior citizens center? Guide them thru setting up and using Yahoo account, basic websurfing, and using the chat on senior sites.

      Make a webpage for them with tutorials to remind them of the lessons, sites to visit, and the email adresses of the school board, newspapers, city concil members etc. so they can write about the wonderful computer club that should get more funding

      • Excellent idea, getting a computer classroom might be a bit harder, the elementary schools already have a lab or 10, but getting authorization to use the High School lab for the community might take a little more hoop jumping.
    • 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!
  • 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.
    • Maybe the demo for those-not-in-the-know could have the player hold:
      • a dust mop
      • a bathroom pass
      • a football
      • a diploma
      • a kitten
      • etc...
      (instead of a fist, a chainsaw, etc)

      Of course, a diploma might still fire rockets... ;)
    • This *must* be in jest.. It sounds cool on the surface, but I really don't think disgruntled high school kids need a simulator to facilitate the planning stages of the public murder-suicide.

      seriously.

      • Yeah, but we want JonKatz to come back with more of his insightful "Hellmouth" series
      • Then high school kids should not be provided with the tools to create such a simulator, if it's so dangerous. Game publishers should be sued for including map editors with their games.

        It should also be illegal to create a game map based on any actual structure. Because high school kids are too stupid to recognize the difference between games and reality. And it's better for them to sit around doing nothing, alone, because their club dissolved after having nothing to do.

        Any student caught looking too hard
  • make some art, do something unique, do something original. make it worth the /.ing you will receive.

  • Model railroading (Score:2, Interesting)

    by uw_dwarf ( 611383 )
    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.

  • Join the ACSL (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hweisbaum ( 450796 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:52PM (#6173321)
    Have your school sign up with the American Computer Science League (ACSL). Very fun and competitive.

    www.acsl.org
  • Build Blinkenlights [blinkenlights.de] on your school building or a nearby tower of your choice. The Chaos Computer Club [www.ccc.de] did it, why not YOU? (The tools are GPL)
  • What are you guys interested in?

    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 t

  • 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 ne

  • custom school distro? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:32PM (#6173741) Journal
    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
    • All great ideas. Throw in an online yearbook, or work with your yearbook staff to get the yearbook in digital format. (if it isn't already, we didn't have these computer dealies back when I was in high-school - unless you consider a 286 a computer).

      Sell the CDs for a buck or two to students to fund it, or make the ISO available for them to burn at their own expense.

  • 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 o
  • 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.
  • 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, m
  • An easy project would be to get involved in one of the Open source Content Management Systems such as xaraya [xaraya.com] 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).

  • Have an old-computers day (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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
    • 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.

  • volunteer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cornflux ( 168139 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @05:16PM (#6175535)
    Why not volunteer to help out the IT staff & school district, as mentioned in this other /. story [slashdot.org]?

  • Projects (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    • corewars [koth.org] tourney (like KoTH)
    • robocode [ibm.com] tourney
    • write tutoring/educational software that could be used by remedial/ESL students, or even for a local elementary school (GPLed, of course -- there isn't near enough GPLed educational software/games out there in the world)
    • solicit suggestions for projects from the faculty and staff of the school (get on their good side for once, and sharpen your skillz while you're at it)
    • someone else mentioned a school blog...
    • Gutenberg Project [gutenberg.net] mirror
    • Anything tha
  • 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.

  • Ummm, yes... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @05:53PM (#6175860)


    > 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.

  • 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.

  • play lan games of counterstrike using the school's computers and network.

  • 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!

  • 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 int
  • Okay, sorry, that was an easy shot. I was in a high school computer club, so I feel your pain.

    Here is some crap we did:
    1. LAN Party, it's a gimmee. It builds interest and gest you new members. Try talking to local video game stores to sponser prizes or something. You can usually get like 5 recent games or something without much effort.
    2. Computer Fixing. If you school lets you do it on school ground, have a day where students can drop off computer and you'll do diagnostics and upgrades for cheap. Go around
  • 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
  • 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.
  • How bout a nice porn site... it's a fun project and really profitable too.

  • 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 gene
  • 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 whe

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