Beth St. Clair and Rick Goldstein, our partners from the Chester Housing Authority, visited campus to talk to students at our first information session of the semester.

Students in attendance included new board members Joe Liang '13 (Treasurer), Nida Atshan '12 (Lang Center Liaison) and Marcus Mello '13 (EdTeam Coordinator). We also had a few new faces as well: Nana Bonna '13, Stella Cho '14, Shawn Kim '14, Issac Opoku '14, Julia Karpati '13, Daoud Sharif '14, Ravi Thackurdeen '14 and Kojo Boateng '14.

Everyone is excited for the semester and a lot of fun is on the horizon. Matter of fact the first taste is is tomorrow. Ryan Carlson '11 and Nick Schultz '11 will be leading a team down to Chester to check out the condition of the labs we manage. Email Ryan at rcarlso1 if you'd like to go or just show up at 3:30pm at Parrish Circle.

See you tomorrow.

The TechTeam has begun installing brand new computers in the labs and will also begin building the third CHA community lab this week. They are currently going to Chester multiple days during the week. This is a great opportunity for volunteers to learn about the computers and technology, the community and the process undertaken to build our very first lab last year.

Check the TechTeam Work Schedule to see when people are going down. Contact Nick (nschult1) and Ryan (rcarlso1) for more information or just take the Lang Center shuttle down to Chester.

• First, we want to have a simple activity that we do with the kids at the beginning of each drop-in. This could be anything from creating a flyer in Paint to making an animation in Scratch. Upon completion each kid should print out their work or show it to the rest of their peers at a computer. This part of the session should last about 30-60 mins. The activities will build upon each other.

• Second, after completing the day's activity each kid and their mentor can decide what to do for the rest of the session. If the kids must play games, we would like mentors to encourage kids to play either educational games or games that require some critical thinking or practicing useful skills. This is a time to get to know the kids and their interests, and engage them in activities that they would enjoy. Activities could be anything from Math problems to playing Millsbury (teaches resource management, inventory)

Kwame
Coordinator

The second drop-in of the semester took place on Thursday March 4th. The Swarthmore students were delighted to meet a large group of excited youth when they arrived. There were actually more youth than computers - sort of a good problem to have).

ChesTech appreciates everyone who is helping making this semester a success and all the youth who keep showing up. We'll be back on in two week (March 18th) after Swarthmore's Spring Break.

We had our first drop-in session of the semester last Thursday. Currently, ChesTech drop-in hours are Thursdays, 4:30 to 6:30 at the Ruth L Bennett community center. We had about 10 Swarthmore mentors go down there. We also had a great turnout from Chester "mentees" - about 10 kids ranging from age 5 to 12. We had a lot of fun talking to mentees about the online games they were playing , and we even showed a few of them how to use Scratch and GIMP. Some Swatties also went over to the Booker T Washington lab with the Tech Team to check it out and set up wireless printing. We were also able to get a few of the computers at the Bennett lab to print wirelessly. One mentee was able to print a color copy of a picture of Kanye West that he and Kwame had designed using GIMP! Hopefully all computers will have wireless printing set up by next week! The kids are excited to come to the drop-in center next week - and so are we!

Today in Kohlberg 115 at 4:30 there will be an interest meeting to try and recruit more Swarthmore students to come and work in the labs. Come on by and check it out!

Nick Schultz and Doug Turnbull worked into the night to finish putting the final pieces in place for the Booker T. Lab. The computer scripts that Ryan Carleson and David Qasem provide were extremely helpful.

As of December 10th, the Ruth L. Bennett Lab has 12 working computers running Ubuntu, with the XP skin installed.  Let everyone know so that we can have as many people as possible use the lab. 

We have now added an issue reporter, so if you have a problem with one of the computers in the lab, you can let us know.  It is available here, or in the Navigation sidebar under the Tech Team Page labeled "Report a Problem"

We are currently putting together a website for the ChesTech Community Computer Labs. Our goal is to build and support commmunity computer labs in each of the four Chester Housing Authority complexes. So far we have built the Bennett Lab which has been used for after-school drop-in hours and adult education classes. We are currently building our second lab at Chatham Estates.