Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Bringing technology closer

After learning to use and maintain computers, summer camp students get to take them home.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
Published July 7, 2006

Times Staff Writer

The teenagers busily clicked their mouses on the desktop computer screens as Samuel Christy circled around them.

"Go to administrative tools," he called out. "Go to computer management. ... Right-click on owner and you can put your name in that."

Following a month of classes, hours of reassembling hard drives, days of instruction on Excel and PowerPoint, the teenagers could call the computers theirs.

Nine students in a summer camp program run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association received four weeks of computer training and got to take the computers home with them.

Before the camp, many of the children did not have computers at home or had old computers that stopped working.

Christy and other coordinators from Computer Mentors Group Inc. provided the training and the new equipment. Redlands, or RCMA, paid the group $7,000, made possible through an Eckerd Family Foundation grant, according to RCMA center coordinator Belen Figueroa.

Computer Mentors is a nonprofit agency based in Tampa that helps underprivileged children, said executive director Ralph Smith, who was on hand to wrap up the final day of camp last week.

Normally classes run for six months at the group's Tampa site. But for the Ruskin course, mentors picked up the pace, driving south to teach the program five days a week for a month in classrooms at Beth Shields Middle School.

The children learned computer terminology, basic Windows, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, navigating the Internet and e-mail functions, Smith said.

Part of the course included the rebuilding of a computer. The students learned how to install memory, the hard drive and the operating systems.

For some of the computer literate children, it was old hat.

Eugenio Alvarado, 12, said he already knew how to get on the Internet and write homework on the computer. But the classes gave him confidence because now he knows how the whole machine works, he said.

"I can use the computer without being afraid of messing it up," said Eugenio, who enters eighth grade at Beth Shields Middle School in the fall.

Jeovana Roque says the programs installed in the computers will help her with her assignments at A.J. Ferrell Middle Magnet School of Technology in Tampa.

Jeovana, who aspires to be an architect, is excited about bringing a new computer home that she can use for her homework and e-mail. It helps her stay in touch with her father, a construction supervisor who travels around the state. She also uses e-mail to write to her grandparents in Mexico, whom she has never met.

Saundra Amrhein can be reached at 661-2441 or amrhein@sptimes.com.

[Last modified July 6, 2006, 19:25:44]