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Mississippi Students Build Their Own PCs
from the teaching-and-helping-at-the-same-time dept
With all the hype over the last few months focused on Maine's program to give all of its students laptops, there's a (potentially) more interesting program happening in Mississippi. The NY Times talks about their program to put an internet connected PC in every classroom by teaching students how to build their own PCs. The state bought a bunch of computer components for much less than it would have cost to buy assembled PCs. Then, they started offering computer classes where students learned about computers, and how to build them. Now the students are building all of the PCs for the classrooms. They're also learning enough so they can help do repair work and maintenance. The kids are also learning skills that they find useful in getting jobs or deciding what other areas they want to study. It sounds like a great program overall - though, I wonder if anyone is complaining that the students are just being used as cheap labor.
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File that one in the "I wish they'd had that when I was at school" department.
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Shit, yeah. I went to high school in the 1980s when computers were viewed as a "vocational" trade, like plumbing. Smart students were steered toward science or engineering, because there was supposed to be a "critical shortage" of them in the years to come (because the Cold War would go on for another thousand years).
Went to college, the Cold War ended, scientists and engineers were laid off by the hundreds of thousands, and they took jobs waiting tables.
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