For a "B" contract I designed and taught two computer classes for Community Education at Ordean. The first class was Basic Programming, it turned out to be a flop. The second class, Hyperstudio, was a great success.

The Basic Programming class was disappointing to me, only three students signed up, of which one stopped coming after two weeks. Another student was too busy to come for the last two sessions of the six session class. Therefore only one student participated in the full course. In todays computer world, the kids are used to using great software that is already made up. They have no idea what goes into the making of a program. The students that took this course were frustrated in how much work there was and how often little mistakes would take a long time to figure out. In the end they completed a program that a basketball coach could use during a game to keep the totals (for each player) of shots taken and made. At the end of the game the coach could instantly print out all of the data including % of shots made for each player.

The students did get a good reality check on what it takes to make a program for a computer. Hopefully, through time, this class will not scare them away from programming, but will help think about what can be made and how to do it.

The second course was great. Great for the students, great for the teacher (myself), and great for the school (Ordean). Only two of the students had any real experience with computers, and only one of the students had very much experience with Hyperstudio.

At first, for the first three weeks, we had hardware and software difficulties. Therefore, I showed the students the general outline and possibilities of this software. They then had a week to think about what they wanted to build a presentation on. The fifth week we broke up into two groups, one group decided to do a presentation on nature and the other group decided to do theirs on sports. They then started to make an outline of their presentations and delegate responsibilities for each other for the next week. From then on they were working on the computers, building cards, scanning pictures, importing sounds and searching the internet. They had fun and learned a lot. Finally we had their programs burned onto their own CD's for future use.

Next year, I plan on teaching two courses, but I am going to drop the basic Programming class and start a Power Point class. Ordean is in the process of buying the Power Point software. This course will be taught in the Fall and highly recommended as a prerequisite to the Hyperstudio course that I plan to teach in the Winter. I am very excited to build these classes up and teach the kids how to use them in their classes for presentations like their history competition. This could also help out for their Grad Rule Packages.

-- Anonymous, June 16, 1999