The Story

The Early Years
1990-1992
Written by Bart Decrem

I got involved with informal instructional uses of computers in May of 1990, when I started volunteering at Computers and You at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Computers & You was, and continues to be, a wonderful program that provides access to technology to families in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Once a week, I'd drive up to the city and help the students in this drop-in program. We might help a 10-year old kid make a card for her mother. A 7-year old might be playing a spelling game on the computer. I really enjoyed working with the children. Frankly, I must have gotten at least as much benefit out of my involvement there as any of the students. I loved the affection that the children gave us, and the feeling of making a difference.

In the Summer of 1990, I found out that there were some computers at a local Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park, which was much closer to where I lived. A couple of friends and myself started volunteering there and structuring a drop-in program. In a few months' time, we built up a program that was really successful. My friend (Bill Goetz) and myself would walk into the computer lab, open the doors, and kids would stream in and have a great time playing games, some of them educational - some just plain fun. At the end of the Summer, we decided to tighten up the program. For the next two years, I developed a somewhat structured program where 20 to 40 kids a day would come in to a computer lab, work on educational programs, earn "credit" and eventually graduate to the next level of the program. Our focus was on using computers to help elementary-school children develop basic skills such as math, reading and writing. We created yearbooks and hired local teenagers to help expand the program. We got some software and used computers donated. It was a great experience for everyone involved, and working at the computer lab beat grad school hands down.

At the end of my three-year graduate school program, I met the people at Echoing Green Foundation and received a two-year fellowship that allowed me to start what is now Plugged In. I received the fellowship in June of 1992 and started working right away, as part of a Summer Enrichment Academy offered by Center For A New Generation, a young non-profit organization in East Palo Alto, which was working out of a local school.

That first Summer, the four of us working in the computer lab wanted to do something different. We came up with the idea of having teams of students use the advanced multimedia equipment that was available at the school to create cartoon animations, using Macromedia Director software. We also played with the idea of having the students create a digital video project, but the hardware and software just wasn't there yet. During that Summer, 9 groups of students worked on 9 different cartoon animations. The 45 students, between 11 and 13 years old, spent a lot of time on developing storyboards and managing their projects. For example, one student did nothing but manage the paperwork associated with one of the projects.

It was a pretty tough Summer, and some of the projects were total disasters, but a few really great projects came out of it. In the Fall of 1992, we set up our offices at the Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park. For the next 12 months, a great team of volunteers, a teenage assistant and myself continued to offer basic-skills programs using computers but also developed a few team projects based on the pilot programs we ran at Center For A New Generation.

By early 1993, it became clear to all of us that, although the basic skills program offered an important service, our team projects offered tremendous potential to complement the classroom education of our students. After we did a fairly straightforward team project called Escapes From The Zoo, some of the students involved in that project created their own magazine, Kidz Stuff. For the first time since I had worked at the computer lab, kids started taking initiative, started telling their own stories and started creating their own production teams.

In the Fall of 1993, we moved into our space in East Palo Alto and hired a full-time program director. A few months later, we were able to hire a full-time site manager and 3 part-time program staff. As we developed the organization, we focused increasingly on developing programs that use computer and electronic communications technologies to offer fairly open-ended learning experiences. It seemed to us that we had the opportunity to use technology in a much looser setting than in traditional educational settings, and to use it as a tool to connect people and create things.

As we explored these options, it became increasingly clear that issues of diversity and multiculturalism and what foundations call "cultural competence" were hugely important. Also, we started developing partnerships with community-based agencies. At first, these partnerships presented a logical "service delivery model" (see CTC Manual Ch.2) for an organization with relatively few ties in the local community. At the same time we realized that, if we're serious about using technology to bring people together, and if we want to use technology to help meet the broad needs of students, we have to work in partnership with other groups.