The LEAP computer learning center opened this July as one of many resources for the 500 children enrolled in LEAP's New Haven summer program. Fifteen groups of boys and girls ages 7-13 (120 children) from five different New Haven neighborhoods came to the center twice weekly for hour-long classes. The bulk of our curriculum was centered on animation projects: younger kids made slide shows combining text, graphics and sound; older kids made simple animated features. We also used interactive reference and math and reading software to supplement the standard LEAP classroom curriculum.
This fall we plan to set up SAT prep courses for our junior staff, who are high school students from the same low-income neighborhoods in which our young campers live. Yale University's Biomedical Communications department is helping us develop computer based video editing projects. We also hope to expand our math/science curriculum (LEAP's central component is reading focused), and to explore the internet through collaborative creative projects with other community computer centers. For example: Plugged In our northern California affiliate center, maintains a web site with an online kids art gallery and Quicktime theater to which we'll be contributing.
LEAP is currently looking for volunteers to help teach classes at the center. Our course material ranges from graphics with KidPix to programming in Basic. Our resources include a dual-platform lab with a Pentium, 486 DX4s, a Power PC 8100 and three Quadra 605s. Three of the machines have full multimedia capacity, including cd-rom, video cards, and sound cards. We've also got a color scanner. Please send some female volunteers our way! Interested folks (men and women!) should contact Andrea Schorr at (203) 432-0262 or email lclc@minerva.cis.yale.edu. A volunteer's committment can be as little as one class a week (an hour), or an hour of supervising informal drop in time. (Volunteers can use our machines to complete their class assignments during this time.)
Our center is a member of the national Playing to Win community computing network, and we are working with New Haven public schools to share and expand the technological resources available to children throughout the city.
Female role modeling is very important to the LEAP project. We try to give Leap kids successful experiences in many different environments so that they'll gain a broader pictures of themselves, a clearer vision of what they can be, and an expanded view of the world as a whole.
The girls and boys who came to the computer center this summer were uniformly enthusiastic about using computers as tools for creative and academic learning. We exposed them to the most current technology in order to cultivate and sustain that excitement. As software becomes easier to use, an interest in computers doesn't necessarily have to involve programming or engineering expertise; kids can look towards becoming graphic designers, video editors, or telecommunications gurus.
The Institute for Learning Technologies (ILTweb), is part of the Columbia University Virtual Information Initiative. ILTweb has a random assortment of educational and "alternative" gopher connections. You can also get to them through the Ralph Bunche computer school web site. Ralph Bunche is a public math and science magnet school in Harlem.